Miriam Klein-Flügge

I am a neuroscientist interested in how the human brain enables us to perform the complex types of decisions that we face in daily life, for example when desired outcomes are only obtained after delay, physical effort, or sequences of actions. I also study the mechanisms by which decision signals reach motor regions to enable implementation of the resulting actions. I use brain imaging (fMRI, MEG) as well as causal stimulation techniques (TMS, ultrasound) to study these processes in the healthy human brain.

More recently, I have begun to examine how the precise aspects of these computations vary as a function of variation in mental health. Mental health disorders such as depression involve abnormal decision-making, and this is something I would like to understand better from a behavioural and a neural point of view. Some or my recent work has examined regions of the brain that show abnormal metabolism in depression, in particular the amygdala.