Max Planck Institutes and Experts

A Bibliotheca Hertziana research project looks at the official art and architecture in Fascist Italy between 1936 and 1943, during the period of the ‘Rome-Berlin Axis’ proclaimed by Mussolini. The way in which the regime presented itself and the way in which the two totalitarian states perceived and influenced each other is of particular interest. The study focuses on Adolf Hitler’s visit to Rome in 1938, the events leading up to it and its consequences.

Modern medical diagnostics and brain research would be unthinkable without magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In addition to traditional imaging, which reveals anatomical structures, functional MRI (fMRI) has become a valuable tool. It comes close to allowing us to watch the brain at work and has contributed considerably to the advances in human cognitive neuroscience. However, fMRI is an indirect method, as it measures a surrogate signal, based on hemodynamics. Smart contrast agents (SCAs) shall overcome this limitation and allow a direct access to neuronal activity.

Researchers of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin asked more than 10,000 individuals in nine European countries about their knowledge of the benefits of early detection screening for cancer. It turns out that Europeans are poorly informed optimists when it comes to early detection screening.

Anticipation, required in both prognosis and planning, occurs on different time scales, and we also become differently aware of being engaged in it. Recent findings of scientists at the MPI for Neurological Research corroborate the view that the frontal lobes play a crucial role in anticipation in general. In particular, the frontal brain’s function in integrating relations into superordinate ones seems reflected by its hierarchical functional-anatomical architecture. Interestingly, even highly abstract kinds of prognoses still call for regions that, on demand, spell out our expectations in the seconds range.

If the content of our minds depends in part on the structure of our bodies, then people with different body types should think differently. To test this proposal, scientists at the MPI for Psycholinguistics used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine the neural correlates of language comprehension and motor imagery cued by verbs that name actions people tend to perform with their dominant hand (write, throw). Action verb understanding and action imagery were differently lateralized in right- and left-handers’ brains, consistent with the way they perform the actions with their particular bodies.