Morten L. Kringelbach

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Morten L. KringelbachMorten L. Kringelbach is Director of Hedonia: Trygfonden Research Group, which is a unique transnational research collaboration between Oxford and Aarhus universities. He holds a dual appointment as Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, and Professor of Neuroscience at Aarhus University, Denmark. In addition, he is also an Extraordinary JRF (Junior Research Fellow) at The Queen’s College, Oxford.

The main focus of his research is to understand the functional neuroanatomy of human conscious and unconscious processing; in particular the aspects related to pleasure, emotion, learning and reward processing. While pleasure is clearly at the heart of what makes us human, at the same time it is also one of the most important factors keeping us from staying healthy, such as the devastating effects of the lack of pleasure found in depression and other affective disorders. A special focus of his research is therefore on understanding hedonic processing in the human brain, which could in time help to treat these disorders more effectively.

His latest book, The Pleasure Center (OUP, 2009), brings together much of his past research to provide a novel synthesis of these important issues for the general public. In addition to his scientific research, he also has a keen interest in linking art and science. He has an on-going collaboration with the Scottish artist Annie Cattrell with whom he has made artworks and sculptures exploring the unseen inner spaces of the living human body and brain.

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