Professor Gero Miesenböck

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Professor Gero Miesenböck - shining a light on the brain

02 Jun 2011

Speakers: Professor Gero Miesenböck

Professor Gero Miesenböck, Co-Director of the Programme on Mind and Machine at the Oxford Martin School, discusses his pioneering research in the emerging field of optogentics – using light to control brain function. In an eccentric and fascinating speech Miesenböck, acknowledges the bad reputation that mind control has in popular fiction, and he is keen to distance himself from his evil animated Dragonball Z alias “Dr Gero”, pointing out that his motives are entirely honourable. Qualifying his aims he says: “I don’t want to take over the world. I control the brain in order to understand how it works.”

His ground-breaking experiments use light to control brain function in fruit flies by making males exhibit female behaviour. Extrapolating the results of these tests he theorised that there is little fundamental difference in male and female brain, but rather our brains have universal capabilities, and at a very late stage of development “a few master switches are clicked” which act to suppress certain parts of the brain. Profesor Miesenböck sees the implications of the research as being very profound, providing “answers to questions that go very deep into our identities and into the way how we think about ourselves.”