Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics

New Study Compares the Creative Processes of Humans and Large Language Models

On Sunday, March 30, 2025, the clocks in Germany will spring forward for daylight saving time. As we all adjust our watches, phones, and computers, what does this shift really do to our bodies? Experts from three different Max Planck Institutes shed light on this question.

The year 2024 saw Max Planck scientists publishing exceptional research across disciplines. We have selected twelve highlights to share

With twelve Synergy Grants, the Max Planck Society claims top spot in the ERC ranking

Self-reinforcing learning can help you understand new things, but it can also reinforce false beliefs

Some people are night owls. Others sneeze when they look at the Sun. Manuel Spitschan and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen study how the human eye processes light stimuli and the crucial role these signals play in regulating our internal clock, which seems to keep ticking even in complete darkness.

Since ChatGPT was released at the end of 2022, there has been intense debate as to whether artificial intelligence already possesses human-like thinking abilities. Eric Schulz from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen is using psychological tests to investigate whether this algorithm shows signs of general intelligence.

The brain of a housefly weighs around one-thousandth of a gram. Nonetheless, thanks to this miniscule control center, the insect can evaluate images in fractions of a second and steer its way through lightning-fast flight maneuvers. It was Werner Reichardt, Founding Director of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, who, more than 50 years ago, described how the motion detectors in the fly brain work.

For Valentin Braitenberg, the brain was the most interesting research subject in the world, apart from the world itself. A former Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, he spent thousands of hours poring over a microscope to get to the bottom of this most complex of organs. His purpose was to examine the fiber pathways in various areas of the brain and to search for their functions.

Stress can make us sick; it can alter the gut microbiome, promote inflammation, and impair immunity. However, the precise mechanisms of how the brain, gut, and microbiome interact are not fully understood. We have discovered a neural circuit by which the brain’s stress center directly controls the gut. Our findings may open up new opportunities for therapeutic intervention, for example in inflammatory bowel disease.

Our brain orients itself in space by creating a cognitive model of its environment. Place cells in the hippocampus play an important role in this process. While behavioural studies suggest that spatial cognition may also be present in fish, previous studies have found no clear evidence for place cells outside of birds and mammals.  Using a tracking microscope, we analysed the brain activity of free-swimming zebrafish larvae at cellular resolution and were able to demonstrate the presence of place cells in fish for the first time.

As soon as we see or hear something, we make a split-second judgement about whether we like it or not. Our research focuses on understanding how these judgements are made and what influence they have on our daily decisions and well-being.

Computer games are originally designed for entertainment. We use them to research human behavior. This opens up new approaches in psychological research on the one hand, and our results contribute to the improvement of artificially intelligent systems.

Although there is a great deal of research on vision and the processing of vision, still little is known about the processing of visual stimuli in higher brain areas. This is because an important research question has not been properly asked: the attentional selection of information. Certain brain areas coordinate where we direct our gaze; others decide what further information to retrieve and report back suggestions for interpreting the visual input. Our hypotheses set a new framework for future understanding of how vision works in our brains.