Vanessa Stempel receives an ERC Starting Grant to investigate brain circuits supporting instinctive behaviors   Instinctive behaviors such as defense, feeding, aggression, and care for offspring have evolved across the animal kingdom to ensure survival without the need for learning. However, scientists still do not fully understand which mechanisms in the brain make these ‘survival’ […] The post Neural circuits for survival instincts first appeared on Max Planck Neuroscience ..read more

Zebra Finches Defy Age-Related Learning Limits We all know the adage, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” As we age, our ability to learn new skills, like mastering a foreign language or picking up a musical instrument, seems to fade. The culprit? A decline in brain plasticity—the brain’s capacity to rewire itself and […] The post Teaching Old Birds New Tricks first appeared on Max Planck Neuroscience ..read more

Understanding why we delay tasks may help reclaim productivity Procrastination, the deliberate but detrimental deferring of tasks, has many forms. Sahiti Chebolu of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics uses a precise mathematical framework to understand its different patterns and their underlying reasons. Her insights could help tailor individual strategies to tackle the issue. […] The post From dawdling to doing: the science of procrastination first appeared on Max Planck Neuroscience ..read more

New research from a Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience researcher could transform how we understand the way opioids affect the brain. Despite significant discussion surrounding the ongoing opioid crisis, current understanding of how opioids function in the brain is quite limited. This is primarily due to challenges in observing and measuring opioid effects in […] The post Visualizing Addiction: How new research could change the way we fight the opioid epidemic first appeared on Max Planck Neuroscience ..read more

When nerve cells in the brain die, diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s develop. To protect these cells, there are immune cells in the brain known as microglia. A study by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing, the University of Bonn and the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine has now shown […] The post Immune cells in the brain form bridges to nerve cells and protect against neurodegenerative diseases first appeared on Max Planck Neuroscience ..read more

Erin Schuman, director at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, has been awarded the prestigious Körber European Science Prize, worth one million euros. Schuman’s work has revolutionised our understanding of how neurons work. Her research has shown that proteins critical for neuron communication, memory storage and overall brain development are produced locally […] The post Erin Schuman awarded prestigious Körber Prize for pioneering research on neuronal protein synthesis first appeared on Max Planck Neuroscience ..read more

Dr. Akhilesh Nandan from MPINB explaines: “Changing the framework that the dynamics is governed by stable states, or attractors, to a framework where the dynamics is dictated by formally unstable structures such as ghost-based scaffolds, enabled us to obtain a potential description for what has been experimentally observed across broad range of systems. Crucial for […] The post Balancing instability and robustness: new mathematical framework to understand dynamics of natural systems first appeared on Max Planck Neuroscience ..read more

Study could provide basis for individual prognoses In a new study, researchers discovered that the retina of schizophrenia patients differs from the retina of healthy participants. These changes could help psychiatrists to recognize who will have a particularly severe course of illness. From an evolutionary perspective, the retina is an outgrowth of the brain and […] The post Retina indicates severity of schizophrenia first appeared on Max Planck Neuroscience ..read more

The brain triggers rapid adaptations in liver mitochondria upon the sight and smell of food What happens in the body when we are hungry and see and smell food? A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research has now been able to show in mice that adaptations in the liver mitochondria take place after only a few minutes. Stimulated by the activation of a group of nerve cells in the brain, the mitochondria of the liver cells change and prepare the liver for the adaptation of the sugar metabolism. The findings, published in the journal Science, could open up new avenues ..read more

Norbert Wiener – the man who established the field of cybernetics – also laid the groundwork for today’s prosperity of Artificial Intelligence Born on November 26, 1894, Wiener was a child prodigy. He graduated from high school at age 11 and earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics at 14 years old from what is now Tufts University in Massachusetts. At 18, Wiener received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in mathematical logic. After stints as a teacher, writer for an encyclopedia, and apprentice engineer, among other things, Wiener was hired in 1919 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technolog ..read more