Departure into the brain

Despite its incredible complexity, the brain is slowly losing its mystery. Together, brain research is tackling the big questions: How do images, melodies and scents find their way into the gray matter of the brain? Where are the smell of thyme, the song of a nightingale, the colors of the sunset, the poetry of a text preserved? How do we think? How do we talk? And how do we act?

At the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, researchers - from linguists and psychologists to neurologists and physicists - are searching for answers using modern imaging methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, magnetoencephalography and electroencephalography. Only in recent years have these "windows on the brain" allowed insights into white and gray matter as we think and act and feel. Moreover, the methods are considered harmless. The test subjects do not have to fear X-rays or needle pricks.

According to the concept of cognitive neuroscience, the aim is to elucidate the relationships between mental functions and the underlying brain areas. No behavior without a neuronal basis - that is the credo of the institute, in contrast to "classical" psychology, which studies information processing without looking at the "hardware" in the head. At the MPI, the main focus is on "mind mapping," i.e., the assignment of functions to individual structures of the brain. This goal has a long tradition in Germany. The brain pioneers Cecile and Oskar Vogt and Korbinian Brodmann produced the first detailed "architectural" maps of the cerebral cortex at the beginning of the 19th century - based on microscopic preparations. Today, it is clear that the optically homogeneous-looking neuronal mass consists of interconnected areas that are differently active in the form of neuronal networks during different performances. There are hierarchies and specializations - some areas of the network are more important for certain tasks than others.

Years ago, only patients with specific brain damage provided indications of this. Thanks to imaging techniques, researchers can also observe the brains of healthy people in action and compare them with the data from the sick. That is why the test subjects at the Leipzig MPI include patients from the neighboring Day Clinic for Cognitive Neurology as well as healthy people of all ages - from infants to the elderly. This is important because the function and anatomy of the brain can change over the course of a person's life.

Most of the MPI researchers' studies are based on findings, the paradigms, of experimental psychology. For days, sometimes weeks, the scientists rack their brains over how to design an experiment. While the test subjects' brains are literally monitored in a magnetic resonance tomograph, for example, they are not allowed to move more than their fingers to press a button to answer a question. Otherwise, the images will be blurred. And so the test subjects solve seemingly ridiculously simple tasks - seemingly! To decode speech processes, for example, they are asked to look for grammatical errors in a sentence they hear. But there are other reasons for the simplicity: If the experimenter does not critically streamline his experiments, he gets lost in the neuronal maze with millions and millions of parallel processes. And learn nothing about the brain.