Lennart Verhagen
Ultrasound can be safely focused at a millimetre scale, even deep within the brain, and modulate neural activity. Ultrasound thus has the potential to provide new insights into how the brain works and help us develop new treatments for neurological and psychiatric disorders.
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“The brain is not porridge” <Dick Passingham> The brain is highly differentiated and structured. Not one bit is like any other. At the same time, no bit acts alone: each region is highly integrated and connected with other areas. In fact, the contribution of a brain region to cognition and behaviour is shaped by […]
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Our human cognitive skills trump those of our primate relatives in many domains, ranging from logical reasoning to managing complex social lives and from tool-use to language. A basic yet powerful faculty might underlie many of these characteristic functions of the human mind: instant conceptual inference.
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The evolutionary emergence of our human ability to quickly infer upon conceptual relationships likely relies on the relative re-organization of large-scale connections in the human brain compared to those in other primates since our last common ancestor.
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I am interested in how we plan and execute social and communicative actions, for example pointing out an object to someone else. This seems like such a simple mundane task that it might be hard to see why it is so fascinating to study.
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In my scientific career I have been continuously fascinated by the interaction between conceptual and motoric faculties of our brain and how they together support uniquely human behaviour.
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