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.

Biosketch

Michael Brecht is Professor for Systems Neuroscience at Humboldt-University Berlin and Coordinator of the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin. His major interest is to understand, how brain structure and activity relate to behavior. The recent research of the Brecht laboratory focused on social touch, kinship, play and elephants.