Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow, Department of Psychiatry, Oxford
Honorary Research Associate
Morten Kringelbach is Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry in the University of Oxford, Professor of Neuroscience at Aarhus University in Denmark and a Senior Research Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford.
Prof Kringelbach’s research goal is to reverse-engineer the human brain and in particular to elucidate the heuristics that allow us to survive and thrive. He focuses on elucidating hedonia (pleasure) and eudaimonia (the life well-lived), and how they are affected in health and disease; in particular seeking to elucidate their breakdown in anhedonia (the lack of pleasure) in neuropsychiatric disorders.
In his Hedonia Research Group they use advanced analysis methods (whole-brain computational modelling, connectomics and psychophysical modelling) on precise paradigms (neuroimaging of spontaneous activity and batteries of psychological tasks using multimodal stimuli including infants, food, drugs and music) in healthy people (including experts such as musicians and parents) – as well as in at-risk and diseased populations (e.g. sleep-disturbances and neuropsychiatric disorders including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and deep brain stimulation).
Infants are a focus of his research and especially how their cute looks, sounds and smells strongly influence the adult brain. The ERC is funding research to better understand the developing parent-infant relationship which may also help to shape the way we can intervene when things go awry, e.g. in sleep deprivation or post-natal depression.
Prof Kringelbach’s group also focus on the neural mechanisms of music as part of the Music in Brain centre at Aarhus University, funded by the Danish National Research Foundation. Another project is investigating the brain changes related to post-traumatic stress-disorder in war veterans.
