Logo Universitätsmedizin Göttingen
Cognitive Neurology > Research & Methods

Heart and Brain

Department of Cognitive Neurology

Heart & Brain is a recent development in the UMG where we study heart-brain interactions together with collaborators from cardiology and neurology. We develop simultaneous heart-brain measurements so that interdependencies between the two organs can be studied directly.

The central hypothesis is that stroke patients with an increased risk of arrhythmias show early identifiable activation patterns in the central autonomic network (CAN) during rest and during autonomic challenges (e.g. psychological or physical stress), which can be detected with ECG-EEG and EEG-fMRI measurements. We are excited to move our Institute into the new Heart & Brain Research Building in the beginning of 2023.

  • Influence of cardiac signals on bistable perception and cortical dynamics
  • Studying the interactions between Heart and Brain with autonomic challenges
  • Heart-brain interactions on the single cell level and to test the causal influence of specific CAN nodes on cardiac function

Recent Publications

  • Milham M, Petkov C, …Wilke M, …Zuo Z. Toward next-generation primate neuroscience: A collaboration-based strategic plan for integrative neuroimaging. Neuron. 2022. Jan 5;110(1):16-20.
  • Steinmann I, Williams KA, Wilke M, Antal A. Detection of tACS aftereffects is improved by considering the individual electric field strength and self-rated sleepiness. Frontiers in Neuroscience. 2022. (in press)
  • Klink PC, Aubry JF, Ferrera VP, … Wilke M, Kagan I, Petkov CI, 2021. Combining brain perturbation and neuroimaging in non-human primates. NeuroImage 2021. 235, 118017
  • WilliamsKA, Cabral-Calderin Y, Schmidt-Samoa C, Weinrich C, Dechent P, Wilke M. Simultaneous transcranial alternating current stimulation and functional magnetic resonance imaging. J Vis Exp. 2017. Jun 5 (124).
  • Cabral-Calderin Y*, Williams K*, Dechent, P, Opitz A, Wilke M. Transcranial alternating current stimulation modulates spontaneous low frequency fluctuations as measured with fMRI. Neuroimage. 2016 Jul 5. S1053-8119(16)30312-3.

This might also interest you