What makes our brains so flexible – Bernstein Award 2012 for Tim Vogels

With up to 1.25 million euros, it is one of the most highly remunerated award for young scientists worldwide. The award enables outstanding young researchers to establish their own group at a German research institution.

This year's awardee Tim Vogels will establish his research group at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Bernstein Center Berlin. The award ceremony took place during the annual meeting of the Bernstein Network Computational Neuroscience in Munich.

How is it possible that, in the continuous stream of sensory information constantly bombarding us, we can flexibly direct our attention to one out of many information sources and neglect everything else? Just imagine a big orchestra, with almost a hundred musicians. In the middle of a piece, we can specifically focus our attention on the tuba, without letting ourselves be distracted by the first violinist’s virtuosic solo. And just a moment later, we can listen to the oboe.

This flexibility and the brain mechanisms on which it is based are the subjects of Tim Vogels' research. His tools are theoretical models. With their help, he is able to simulate neural networks in a computer and use them as virtual “guinea pigs” to formulate new hypotheses, which, in turn, can provide testable predictions for neurobiological experiments. He is interested both in slow changes that are typically associated with learning processes as well as in very short-term changes that allow us to quickly change our focus of attention.

Vogels’ previous research has already provided a basis for exploring these questions. Thanks to Vogels’ and others’ models, we know today that the neural networks in the brain maintain their sensitive balance by a well-tuned combination of excitatory and inhibitory stimuli. Vogels believes that this is the key to the flexible switching mechanisms in the brain. “I imagine that excitatory stimuli and their inhibitory counterparts interact with each other like guest and doorman,” said Vogels. “The qualities of both will determine the decision of which guest – which environmental stimulus – is allowed to pass and which not. But also additional external factors may play a role, such as, metaphorically speaking, whether the establishment is full already, or how many friends the guest is bringing along.”

Vogels will now pursue these and other questions in Berlin, in cooperation with local scientists of the Bernstein Center and the Humboldt-Universität, in particular Michael Brecht, Henning Sprekeler, Richard Kempter and Susanne Schreiber.

Tim Vogels initially studied physics at Technische Universität Berlin. After his pre-diploma, a Fulbright scholarship offered him the opportunity to continue his studies at Brandeis University in Boston, USA. He received his PhD in 2007 in the laboratory of Larry Abbott, a pioneer of computational neuroscience and the author of one of the most widely read textbooks on the subject. After a postdoctoral stay with Rafael Yuste at Columbia University, he became a Marie Curie Reintegration Fellow in 2010, in the laboratory of Wulfram Gerstner at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.

The Bernstein Award is part of the National Bernstein Network for Computational Neuroscience, a funding initiative launched by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in 2004. The initiative’s aim was to sustainably establish the new and promising research discipline of Computational Neuroscience in Germany. With this support, the network meanwhile has developed into one of the largest research networks in the field of computational neuroscience worldwide. Namesake of the network is the German physiologist Julius Bernstein (1835-1917).

Contact:

Tim Vogels
Laboratoire de Calcul Neuromimétique
École Polytechnique Fédérale, Station 15
1015 Lausanne
Switzerland
phone: +41 21 693 5265
email: tim.vogels@epfl.ch