DoellerLab

Our memories are what makes each of us unique, but this unique set of experiences is precisely what makes scientific study of memory difficult. The cumbersome nature of neuroimaging tools doesn’t help. MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanners are so large and heavy that they are often positioned in place and the housing is built around them. So how can the scientists study the brain during everyday realistic memory tasks? We have decided to use movies in our pursuit of brain mechanisms of memory for events, the so-called “episodic memory”.

Read More

Humans have the remarkably ability to integrate information from multiple memories and infer indirect relationships. But how does our brain support this important function? In the latest study from our lab, we show that rhythmic brain waves, called theta oscillations, engage and synchronize the brain regions that support the integration of memories. The results were published in the journal Current Biology.
Read More

Alzheimer’s patients suffer from severe memory loss and disorientation. An international research team led by Christian Doeller (Donders Institute, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands) and Nikolai Axmacher (Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany) has now shown that a genetically increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease affects a brain region known as the “GPS” of the brain already in healthy young adults. The results were published in the journal “Science”.
Read More

In a new paper in Nature Neuroscience, we show that memories of the same events co-exist at different scales in the brain. To avoid interference, the different memory scales (coarse, medium and fine) are distributed across different parts of the hippocampus, with finest scale memories at the back and the coarser memories at the front.
Read More

The 2014 Nobel prize in Medicine was awarded for the discovery of the brain’s GPS in the rodent entorhinal cortex. Despite numerous attempts in neuroscience and medicine in the past decades, the homologue entorhinal subregions in humans remained elusive. In this study, we combine high-field fMRI with novel connectivity methods to identify the corresponding areas in humans.
Read More

We’ve all had that ‘Aha!’ moment when pieces of a puzzling problem seem to fall into place as we gain insight into a previously obscured solution. But what happens in our brains when we think ‘Aha!’? That was the question that Branka Milivojevic, Alejandro Vicente-Grabovetsky and Christian Doeller sought to answer.
Read More