Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics

With twelve Synergy Grants, the Max Planck Society claims top spot in the ERC ranking

Self-reinforcing learning can help you understand new things, but it can also reinforce false beliefs

A circuit between the brain and gut influences the gut flora and thus regulates the immune system

Poor lighting conditions can reduce quality of life

Understanding why we delay tasks may help reclaim productivity

Since ChatGPT was released at the end of 2022, there has been intense debate as to whether artificial intelligence already possesses human-like thinking abilities. Eric Schulz from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen is using psychological tests to investigate whether this algorithm shows signs of general intelligence.

The brain of a housefly weighs around one-thousandth of a gram. Nonetheless, thanks to this miniscule control center, the insect can evaluate images in fractions of a second and steer its way through lightning-fast flight maneuvers. It was Werner Reichardt, Founding Director of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, who, more than 50 years ago, described how the motion detectors in the fly brain work.

For Valentin Braitenberg, the brain was the most interesting research subject in the world, apart from the world itself. A former Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, he spent thousands of hours poring over a microscope to get to the bottom of this most complex of organs. His purpose was to examine the fiber pathways in various areas of the brain and to search for their functions.

Machines are naturally dumb. They lack flexibility and the ability to react appropriately and at the right time. Scientists are trying to teach robots something akin to intelligence.

Our brain orients itself in space by creating a cognitive model of its environment. Place cells in the hippocampus play an important role in this process. While behavioural studies suggest that spatial cognition may also be present in fish, previous studies have found no clear evidence for place cells outside of birds and mammals.  Using a tracking microscope, we analysed the brain activity of free-swimming zebrafish larvae at cellular resolution and were able to demonstrate the presence of place cells in fish for the first time.

As soon as we see or hear something, we make a split-second judgement about whether we like it or not. Our research focuses on understanding how these judgements are made and what influence they have on our daily decisions and well-being.

Computer games are originally designed for entertainment. We use them to research human behavior. This opens up new approaches in psychological research on the one hand, and our results contribute to the improvement of artificially intelligent systems.

Although there is a great deal of research on vision and the processing of vision, still little is known about the processing of visual stimuli in higher brain areas. This is because an important research question has not been properly asked: the attentional selection of information. Certain brain areas coordinate where we direct our gaze; others decide what further information to retrieve and report back suggestions for interpreting the visual input. Our hypotheses set a new framework for future understanding of how vision works in our brains.

The brain is he most poorly understood organ within the human body. It is permanently in action, for example, it processes visual inputs and then rapidly decides how to interact with our environment. To achieve this, the brain consumes about 20 percent of the total energy demand of the body, and about 50 percent more than the heart. Our research team has developed a miniaturized magnetic resonance sensor (NMR) that can measure nerve activity and blood regulation with much higher spatial and temporal resolution than conventional systems.