Prof. Benedikt Grothe is one of the leading figures of systemic and comparative neuroscience. His research is focused on the neural mechanisms behind temporal auditory processing, having extensively studied sound localization and sound recognition. His lifetime’s work successfully challenged and changed some previously widely accepted neuroscientific norms of hearing mechanisms, so we can now better understand the complex neural representation of sound. 

Sound localization is a crucial process in predators and prey alike – it assured the survival of mammals ever since their first appearance about 200 million years ago. However, despite being a primal function of the mammalian brain, localizing sound has a more complex mechanism than what we previously thought. Prof. Grothe and his team have discovered that neuronal inhibition plays an important role in how time is used by the brain to represent space.