Welcome to the O’BRAIN Lab

Welcome to the O’BRAIN Lab

The O’BRAIN Lab is a group of researchers inves­ti­gat­ing the inter­play between obe­si­ty and the brain.
Over­weight and obe­si­ty rates have risen steadi­ly in recent decades. Although many of us share sim­i­lar envi­ron­ments, only a few peo­ple become obese. How come? In our search for the cause, we are con­front­ed with a com­plex inter­play of many fac­tors: In addi­tion to the envi­ron­ment, behav­iour, brain func­tion, and genet­ic influ­ences deter­mine the deci­sions we make and thus ulti­mate­ly also our body weight.

Research

We try to answer fun­da­men­tal ques­tions about obe­si­ty: How does obe­si­ty devel­op? Why is it so hard to resist tempt­ing food? Does our brain deter­mine what and how much we eat? How does our nutri­tion shape our brain? Do changes with­in the brain make it so dif­fi­cult for us to break bad eat­ing habits? Last but not least: How can we help to improve eat­ing habits?

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Members

Our team is cur­rent­ly based in two places: Leipzig (Ger­many) and Helsin­ki (Fin­land). We bring togeth­er researchers from var­i­ous dis­ci­plines such as neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gy, psy­chol­o­gy, cog­ni­tive sci­ence, math­e­mat­ics, and med­i­cine.

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Volunteer 🇩🇪

Für die Zeit nach dem Lock­down suchen wir für Stu­di­en:

Momen­tan find­en keine Tes­tun­gen statt. Für die Zeit­en, in denen der Test­be­trieb wieder aufgenom­men wer­den kann, wurde ein umfan­gre­ich­er Kat­a­log von Hygien­e­maß­nah­men entwick­elt, um sowohl die Teil­nehmerIn­nen als auch das Per­son­al während der Exper­i­mente zu schützen. Sie kön­nen unsere Forschung unter­stützen, indem Sie sich in unserem Proban­den­pool anmelden. Hof­fentlich sehen wir uns bald wieder am Insti­tut.

Teil­nehmen
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See the Team
Teil­nehmen

Recent News

Happy new year — with a new paper!

On the verge of 2021, we pub­lished a new paper on behav­iour­al con­trol in obe­si­ty. Lieneke Janssen and col­leagues found dif­fer­ences in the type of con­trol used for deci­­sion-mak­ing between obese peo­ple on the one hand, and nor­mal weight and over­weight peo­ple on the oth­er hand. The impor­tance of exam­in­ing…

We have code

In our 2016 Fron­tiers in Genet­ics paper on the fast and effi­cient mul­ti­vari­ate analy­sis of high-dimen­­sion­al data we pro­vid­ed a link to share soft­ware code, sam­ple input data and com­plete doc­u­men­ta­tion. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the web­site no longer exists but we have moved the code (and exam­ple data) to github. Hap­py analy­ses…

Same same, but different

Same same, but different

We have a new addi­tion to our series on the rela­tion­ship of smell per­cep­tion and obe­si­ty. In our lat­est paper Maria Poes­sel and her co-authors find that peo­ple with high­er BMI have low­er olfac­to­ry bulb vol­ume while olfac­to­ry func­tion is seem­ing­ly still nor­mal. The full sto­ry is avail­able here.