About me

So, I’m Gal Reinharts, and if I had to sum up who I am, I’d say I’m a person with a very deep hunger to understand. Not in the sense of knowing a lot of facts or being “intellectual,” but in the sense that I find it very hard to come across something that interests me and not want to understand what’s really going on there.

I look at humans and at life as this enormous system that can be explored. When I look at an emotion, for example, I can see it at the same time as a very real personal experience, a mechanism in the brain, a product of evolution, a behavior, and maybe even a philosophical question. I don’t feel the need to choose which of these perspectives is the “right” one. To me, they can all be different pieces of the same thing.

And that’s probably one of the things that most defines the way I think: I’m looking for the bigger picture. I like taking things apart to understand how they work, but I don’t want to stay with the pieces. I want to put them back together and see what they say as a whole.

I have a very scientific foundation. I studied biology and I’m studying psychology, and accuracy, evidence, and a real understanding of mechanisms matter a lot to me. But I’m not willing to let the boundaries of science become the boundaries of my curiosity. If a question takes me to philosophy, I’ll go to philosophy. If it takes me to evolution, physics, animal behavior, cognition, or cosmology, I’ll go there. To me, different fields are simply different ways of looking at the same reality.

And at the center of all of this is something very human. I don’t want to understand the brain just because the brain is interesting. I want to understand what it means to be this thing that has a brain. What it means to be a biological creature that feels love and fear, builds an identity, makes decisions, becomes attached to people, fears death, thinks about the future, and knows that it exists.

And that connects to another part of me that is just as central: I really love being alive.

Freedom, choice, experience, nature, beauty, creation, love, curiosity, and meaning matter deeply to me. I don’t want to stand outside of life and analyze it. I want to understand it while being someone who is living it.

So for me, knowledge never ends with “now I know something.” What interests me is what happens next. If I understand why my brain does something — do I relate to myself differently? If I understand something about evolution — do I see other people differently? If a philosophical idea changes my definition of a good life — do I start making different choices?

To me, there’s a very strong connection between understanding life and living it.

And I don’t just want to absorb knowledge. I want to create from it. When I understand something, I have an urge to do something with it — talk about it, write about it, turn it into a lecture, connect it to another idea, maybe turn it into a film, a book, an object, or an experience. Knowledge, to me, is raw material for creation.

And that’s why we’re here, at ZECOSMI — my space to create.

In the end, I’m a person who spends half her life trying to understand this thing we find ourselves inside of —
and the other half taking what I understand and doing something with it in the world.