The Bernstein Center at the University of Freiburg provides an insight into how the brain works in a new series of lectures. A conversation with the organizers Ad Aertsen and Stefan Rotter.
BZ: Brain research arouses great public interest. Many should have seen a colored magnetic resonance brain scan, which made it clear where in the brain which function should be located. Is this notion of localization still relevant?
Rotter: Partly, partly. Certain parts of the brain are primarily responsible for certain functions – one part for motor skills, another for sensory functions, the next for language. But memory is definitely not a localized property. Apart from that, the functional nuclear spin is a very crude method in which one can only see possible localizations to a limited extent.
Aertsen: Basically, we only measure the local catering, i.e. how much oxygen is subsequently transported to the cells. But that only says where there was activity a few seconds before, not what happened at that point, or whether other areas were active without needing additional catering. What is certain is that brain diseases are not caused by the fact that one cubic millimeter of the brain is sick. One must consider much larger areas and groups of areas in order to reasonably describe diseases of the brain.
“At the moment, the popular idea is that you can …
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