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Michael Brecht

Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany

Website

Title

Brain representations of whiskers and genitals

Abstract

My lecture will center on the body-brain-relationship. In the first part of the lecture I will talk about early vibrissal system. I will discuss how novel X-ray based techniques allow elucidating the structure of vibrissal mechanotransduction and how large-scale neural reconstructions help us understand the mapping of afferent information onto the brain. Wire-by-wire connectivity analysis will change our understanding of body and brain. The second part of the lecture deals with sexual touch. I will show that genital representation have an unusual degree of plasticity and that genital touch affects puberty, brain and body. Finally, I discuss unexpected male-female difference in human genital representations.