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?
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.
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.
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
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.