At the annual meeting of the MPG on 25 June 2025, the Otto Hahn Medal was awarded 28 times for outstanding scientific achievements in connection with doctoral theses. This year, Katharina Menn from the Department of Neuropsychology and Malte Brammerloh from the Department of Neurophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain…
Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly important and is already present in many aspects of our daily lives—but does AI perceive and think about the world the same way we humans do? To answer this question, Max Planck researchers and members of the Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen Florian Mahner, Lukas Muttenthaler and Martin Hebart…
Human interaction crucially relies on our ability to infer other people’s thoughts and intentions, a process widely known as Theory of Mind or mentalizing. Even little children are sensitive to other person's mental states. Scientists from the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and the Research Centre Jülich now…
The brain is a complex network of neurons that communicate with each other in circuits embedded in the structural scaffolding of the brain. There are two main types of neurons: excitatory neurons, which transmit information by amplifying neural signals, and inhibitory neurons, which can suppress the signals. Together, excitation and inhibition…
Excellent success for Leipzig University: its Leipzig Center of Metabolism (LeiCeM) research cluster will receive multi-million-euro funding over the coming years as part of the Excellence Strategy of the German federal and state governments. This was announced by the Joint Commission of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the German Council…
We know this from sport or rehabilitation: if you imagine a movement and practise it with the corresponding kinaesthetic feeling in your head, you can often improve your performance. Magdalena Gippert, Arno Villringer, Bernhard Sehm and Vadim Nikulin from MPI CBS in Leipzig have now investigated whether imagining just a part of a motor sequence is…
Language processing in humans depends on the neuronal connection between language areas in the brain. Until recently, this language network was thought to be uniquely human. Now, in a discovery about the evolutionary basis of our language, researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, in collaboration with the Max…
How are the relations between different action plans organized and structured in the brain to support our rich behavioural repertoire? Irina Barnaveli and Christian Doeller together with Simone Viganò and Daniel Reznik from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and with Patrick Haggard from the Institute of Cognitive…
Alongside Alzheimer's disease, changes to the brain's vascular system are the most common cause of dementia. So-called white matter lesions are indications of tiny vascular damage in the brain and can be measured in an MRI scan. They are very common in older people and are linked, for example, to slower thinking in everyday life. Using data from…
In his new science communication book, which will be published by mvg-Verlag on April 14, 2025, Michael Skeide sheds light on how brain research debunks the biggest misconceptions and how we can really learn better.
Did you know that a woman’s heartbeat subtly changes across her menstrual cycle? These rhythmic changes, driven by hormonal fluctuations, offer a unique window into the intricate connection between the female brain and heart. In a new Paper published in Science Advances, Max Planck researchers Jellina Prinsen, Julia Sacher and Arno Villringer…
The evolution of language in humans, in contrast to communicative systems in other primate species is hotly debated. Now, thanks to the study of brain connectivity between different primate species and by adopting a framework proposed for segregating functional language and communication activation in humans, Angela Friederici and Yannick Becker…
