TUM Global | 6. Neuroscience: From Cybernetics to the Future of Medicine

Humans have long pondered how the workings of the human brain.
Indeed evidence of holes drilled in skulls from our pre-historic
ancestors suggests that attempts to heal pain, alleviate health
issues and experiment with brain function is as old as we are.


Join us for this special episode with Professor Josef
Rauschecker, of Georgetown University in Washington, where we
explore the advancements made by neuroscience in recent years,
and examine how accelerations in technology and interdisciplinary
research has exciting implications for the future of human
health. Josef has dedicated over forty years to the discipline of
neuroscience, and was appointed as a TUM Ambassador in 2019 in
recognition of his efforts. Originally a TUM graduate, and for
many years a Hans Fischer Senior Fellow at the TUM Institute for
Advanced Studies, we are delighted to name Professor Rauschecker
as a firm member of our community.

On 27 June 2022, shortly after Prof. Josef Rauschecker’s podcast
was recorded, one of Josef’s first teachers in the field of
neuroscience, Sir Colin Blakemore of Oxford University passed
away. Much admired all over the world for his pioneering studies
in the early 1970s on the influence of early visual exposure on
the development of our ability to see, Sir Colin was the youngest
ever professor of Physiology at Oxford at the age of 35. Josef
Rauschecker gained his first experience of single cell recordings
in the cerebral cortex of young kittens in Blakemore’s laboratory
at the University of Cambridge. He was invited by Blakemore to do
his PhD thesis in his laboratory, but declined because his
fiancée was waiting for him in Munich.


It is also important to note that Prof. Rauschecker‘s tinnitus
project with Prof. Weber received an enormous boost through the
arrival of Prof. Barbara Wollenberg, Director of the Department
of Otorhinolaryngology, at the Klinikum rechts der Isar in 2019.
She and her team will collaborate in this research project, which
will raise the profile of the ENT clinic in the field of
tinnitus.

Please see full program notes on our website:
 lll.tum.de/podcast