For humans and most animals, vision is the most important source of information about their immediate surroundings. It is often essential that we react immediately to something we see, either by grabbing it or avoiding it. For many animals, this is a matter of life and death. Prey animals must remain still or run away quickly when something moves above them. These types of reactions are instinctive and do not need to be learned. But although they are instinctive, they can change with experience or circumstances. Alexander Heimel's lab investigates how these reactions are caused in the brain, between perception in the eye and the motor response of the muscles.
Why does something sometimes attract our attention and sometimes not? How does our brain regulate that? I am investigating this with mice. Their brain areas for instinctive choices are smaller, but very similar to ours. By measuring mice that look around freely and react, we discover how we see and act.
About Alexander Heimel
Prof. Dr Alexander Heimel (1975, Utrecht) began his academic career at Utrecht University, where he graduated cum laude in 1998 with a master's degree in mathematics and a master's degree in physics. He continued his studies at King's College London to conduct his doctoral research. In 2002, he completed his thesis Dynamics of learning by neurons and agents, in which he investigated how quickly neural networks with many neurons learn patterns and how supply and demand fluctuate in a market when traders only have the same information. At first glance, these systems may seem to have little in common, but in his thesis, Heimel showed how the mathematical descriptions and techniques used to calculate this are very similar.
After obtaining his PhD, Alexander went on to work as a postdoctoral researcher in a neurobiology lab at Brandeis University (Massachusetts, USA). There, he conducted measurements on the visual system of grey squirrels. Heimel then returned to the Netherlands to investigate the molecular properties of learning in the visual system of mice at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam. After several years as a postdoctoral researcher, Heimel became a group leader there and is now researching the vision and visually driven instinctive behaviour of mice. Throughout his career, Heimel has received various awards and grants, including the NWO VIDI grant in 2010.