Pieter Roelfsema | “Toward visual brain prostheses: restoring sight through cortical and thalamic stimulation”

Emerging techniques | Manfred Eigen lecture theatre Our goal is to restore vision by directly stimulating the visual brain, bypassing damaged eyes of blind individuals. Electrical stimulation of visual cortex can evoke phosphenes, even in patients blind for decades. Using arrays of 1,000 electrodes, we demonstrated that patterned stimulation can generate recognizable visual forms. However, cortical implants face limitations in…

Noa Lipstein | “Decoding molecular diversity in the nervous system”

Emerging techniques \ Manfred Eigen lecture theatre I will present our efforts to develop methodologies for mapping the molecular composition of diverse synapse subtypes at the subcompartment level, and how this work led to the discovery of pathways that control synaptic organization and plasticity. Speaker profile

Benjamin Judkewitz | “The smallest vertebrate brain knows how to sing”

Emerging techniques \ Manfred Eigen lecture theatre I will describe our work on Danionella cerebrum, a tiny fish that is small and transparent even in adulthood, when neural circuits and behavior have matured. Despite having the smallest known adult vertebrate brain, Danionella displays a rich set of behaviors, including courtship, schooling and – remarkably – acoustic communication. I will discuss…