Björn Herrmann

Western Interdisciplinary Research Building

herrmann.b@gmail.com

The range of sounds we experience varies greatly when we transition from, for example, a quiet mid-afternoon hike on an abandoned mountain to a loud rock concert in a group of thousands of fans. One scientific question of substantial importance to understanding human experience is how exactly our brains are capable of adjusting to contexts in which the sound experience varies so greatly. It is hard to imagine how our brains could cope with such extreme differences between soundscapes without substantial flexibility in the way they respond. My research makes use of electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography, and functional imaging in order to investigate the flexibility with which neural activity and human perception adjusts to the acoustic properties of the environment, and whether flexibility in neural and perceptual adjustments change when growing older. I strongly focus on auditory sensory processes and investigate stimulus-evoked activity as well as neural oscillations as prime candidates for expressing flexible adjustments to, for example, spectral and temporal properties of the environment.

My personal webpage can be found here, along with a list of my current publications.