Switching in the brain: a fresh perspective

Research team at Göttingen Campus investigates processing of sensory impressions The human brain is extremely dynamic. The connections between nerve cells change when we learn or forget. But our brain's computations change even faster than its structure: in a heartbeat, we shift our focus from what we see to what we hear or smell. The coffee aroma might have been there all the time, but as we attend to it, circuits in our brain shift their activity rhythms and we actively perceive the aroma. A transdisciplinary research team at the Göttingen Campus has now combined experimental and mathematical approaches and found a new perspective on the rhythmic processes in the brain. The results were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS). Scientists at the Göttingen Campus Institute for Dynamics of Biological Networks (CIDBN) have investigated the cellular mechanisms behind these processes.