Talks

Events

Graduate Programs

We aim at fostering a new generation of scientists who have been trained in both mathematical / computational skills and neuroscientific methodologies. Therefore, the Bernstein Center Berlin has set up two international, interdisciplinary graduate programs:

→ Master Program
→ Einstein Foundation Doctoral Program

 

News

We are delighted to announce that Ben Gerhardt has been awarded the Humboldt Prize 2025 for his outstanding master’s thesis.

Ben Gerhardt received the Humboldt Prize 2025 for his master’s thesis titled “Three-dimensional architecture and linearized mapping of vibrissa follicle afferents.”

Congratulations, Mr. Gerhardt, on this remarkable achievement!

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Prof. Adrien Doerig (BCCN & Freie Universität Berlin), together with collaborators from the Universities of Osnabrück, Minnesota, and Montréal, led a study showing that modern language models from Artificial Intelligence (AI)—when given natural descriptions of scenes—can predict how the human brain responds to visual input.
 
When we view the world, our brain builds rich internal representations—not just identifying objects like a “tree” or a “person,” but grasping context, meaning, and relationships. Yet until recently, scientists lacked the tools to capture and quantitatively study this high-level visual understanding.
 
In a new study published in Nature Machine Intelligence the research team used large language models (LLMs)—the same type of models behind ChatGPT—to extract “semantic fingerprints” from scene descriptions. These fingerprints turned out to align closely with patterns of brain activity recorded via fMRI as participants viewed the same scenes, and allowed the team to decode textual descriptions of what the people were seeing based only on the neuroimaging measurement.
 
The team also trained computer vision models to predict these LLM-based semantic fingerprints from images directly. These models, guided by linguistic representations, matched brain activity more accurately than many of today’s best image recognition systems.

The results suggest that human visual representations may be organized in a way that mirrors how modern language models represent meaning—opening new doors for both neuroscience and artificial intelligence.
 

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About

The Bernstein Center Berlin was founded in 2004 and addresses one of the most challenging questions in computational and cognitive neuroscience:

“How is it possible that we can react to sensory stimuli with millisecond precision if intermediate processing elements – on the level of single synapses, single neurons, small networks and even large neural systems – vary significantly in their response to the same repeated stimulus?”

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Welcome to Berlin

Welcome to the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin (BCCN Berlin) and the city of Berlin. The BCCN Berlin is a great place to study or do research in Computational Neuroscience. In our international Master and PhD Program students learn cutting edge methods and cohorts are small. Research at the BCCN Berlin is international and interdisciplinary.  Junior and senior scientists cooperate in a lively research atmosphere.

Berlin is a great city for living with an excellent cultural live, lots of green areas for leisure, interesting and diverse people, three mayor universities and a university hospital.