The Adaptive Brain in Action: An Interview with Neuroscientist Tobias Bonhoeffer

Tobias Bonhoeffer, a director at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried, Germany, is a leading researcher on how the brain adapts to its environment. Armed with new imaging methods such as two-photon microscopy, he and his colleagues are now able to view the ongoing alterations of neural circuitry in living animals.

Bonhoeffer will be sharing some results of this research in a lecture sponsored by The Kavli Foundation at the upcoming FENS Forum of European Neuroscience in Amsterdam. Recently, Bonhoeffer discussed recent advances in his science and where he sees it headed, including how imaging advances may be bringing scientists closer to the point when they can not only describe precisely how learning occurs at the cellular and molecular level, but also understand which are the structures where knowledge is stored.

“It would be fascinating if you could look into an intact brain with… new technologies and see how new connections are being made while an animal learns something. Then, if you could actually show that the loss of those connections results in the animal forgetting what it learned, you would have the first really good evidence that you have understood an important component of memory and information storage.” Full story.