Press releases

Have you ever heard a child proudly announce in German, “Schau mal, zwei Hünde!” What sounds amusing to us adults clearly shows just how difficult forming plurals still is for a three-year-old. The child has already understood that there is a rule (for example, adding an “e” to the German word for dog, “Hund”, makes the plural “Hunde” but also uses an umlaut similar to the German plural for hands “Hände”) and that it’s not just a matter of learning a new word. After all, the child has certainly not heard “Hünde” yet; they just aren’t applying the plural rule quite correctly yet. Cheslie C. Klein, Philipp Berger, Charlotte Grosse Wiesmann, and Angela D. Friederici from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI CBS) have now investigated in a study to what extent the maturation of neural pathways in the brain is linked to children’s ability to form the plural of words.

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Depressed mood, quick temper, sleep problems, anxiety, feeling detached and barely able to cope with everyday life – women with premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), a condition that causes great suffering for those affected, are familiar with all of these symptoms. more

Christian Doeller, Director of the Psychology Department at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and Vice President of the Max Planck Society, is the new recipient of Germany's most prestigious research award. He was one of ten scientists selected from 144 nominations by the relevant DFG committee on 11 December 2025. The winners each receive prize money of 2.5 million euros. They can use these funds for their research work for up to seven years as they see fit and without bureaucratic red tape. The Leibniz Prizes will be awarded at a ceremony in Berlin on 18 March 2026.
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A new study led by cognitive neuroscientists at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences shows that merely imagining a positive encounter with someone can make you like them better by engaging brain regions involved with learning and preference. The findings could have implications for psychotherapy, sports performance and more.
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The European Research Council (ERC), which promotes cutting-edge research in Europe, has awarded Lars Meyer from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig the prestigious Consolidator Grant. For his project "Language in Balance: an Imprint of Brain Electrophysiology? (BALANG)”, he will receive funding of up to two million euros over the next five years.

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New research forms a bridge between human and machine representation
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On the 24^th of October, 2025, we lost our former colleague, collaborator, and friend, Jonathan “Jonny” Smallwood, who passed away peacefully at the age of 50, in the presence of his devoted wife and family, following a courageous battle with cancer. more

Some brain signals are rhythmic, others non‑rhythmic – the latter long dismissed as mere neural noise. Now, an international research team led by the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (Moritz Gerster, Arno Villringer, and Vadim Nikulin) has revealed that this so‑called “noise” represents a previously overlooked signature that reflects Parkinson’s disease symptoms. The new study, published in eBioMedicine, analyzed data from 119 patients—making it one of the largest investigations of its kind.
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Imagine chatting at a party and trying to listen to your friend telling you about her day while there are other people talking, laughing and celebrating at the same time – difficult, isn’t it? The challenge of listening to one speaker when several people speak at once is called the cocktail party problem. Researchers from the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and Leipzig University in collaboration with colleagues from the Max-Planck-Institute for Empirical Aesthetics and Lübeck University investigated what happens in the brain when we try to focus on one talker while ignoring another one. In the new study, now published in the Journal of Neuroscience, they show that the processing of both the voice we attend to and the voice we ignore plays a key role in how well we understand speech.
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While popular wisdom associates the heart with emotions and the brain with reason, the scientific world seems to be increasingly convinced that all mental processes are determined solely by the brain. Interestingly, however, there is growing evidence that the heart, which also contains nerve cells, has a strong influence on thinking and feeling. In an opinion paper recently published in the journal Trends in Neurosciences, Arno Villringer, Vadim Nikulin and Michael Gaebler from the MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI CBS) propose a new concept that explains both the important role of the heart in many mental processes and the frequent co-occurrence of cardiovascular and mental illnesses.
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