About Me

I am an aspiring cognitive scientist and composer from Istanbul living in Toronto. Behind my artistic and intellectual endeavors is my engagement against fanaticism. I'm an advocate of freedom of expression and science communication.

I graduated from Saint-Joseph French High School of Istanbul in 2020 and was granted an ABRSM diploma for piano in 2019. I attended BU Summer Challenge Program in 2018 and Harvard Secondary School Program in 2019. I am currently a third year double majoring in CogSci and linguistics and minoring in anthropology at the University of Toronto.

Since childhood, I have been intrigued by two questions: how language might have emerged and how an ideal language would be like. During high school, I became increasingly engrossed in developing my conlang and came across mythic and pseudoscientific accounts on language like the Tower of Babel narrative and the Sun Language Theory. Until university, I couldn't reach any satisfactory answers to my questions, but my questions refined and multiplied.

I am interested in what makes our species special amongst other primates and the biocultural evolution of this distinctness. I find language to be central in this respect. Thus, I have centered my undergraduate degree around language across various disciplines such as cognitive science, linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and philosophy of language. My potential research interests include the origins of language, premodern language, artificial language, non-sapiens primate cognition, and interfaces between brain, mind, culture, and language.

I was introduced to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russel by the graphic novel Logicomix, by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou, in my late childhood. The novel has been strongly influential on me as it kindled my interest in analytic philosophy, logic, and philosophy of language. I am an admirer of Oscar Wilde's wit and a fan of his masterpiece The Picture of Dorian Gray. I am also a lover of Maurits Cornelis Escher's and Maurice Ravel's work. Among other intellectuals that have had a significant influence on me are Alan Watts, Yuval Noah Harari, and Noam Chomsky.