Friedemann Pulvermüller#

Obituary, Einstein Center Neurosciences

Biography#

Friedemann Pulvermüller studied Biology and Linguistics and took a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Tübingen followed by another PhD in Psychology at the University of Konstanz. After postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics and the Linguistics Department of the University of California at Los Angeles, he took the post-doctoral ‘Habilitation’ degree in Behavioral Neuroscience and in Psychology. He then received a Heisenberg Fellowship and, in 2000, accepted a tenured appointment as Research Leader in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language at the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, UK, from where he moved to the Freie Universität Berlin in 2011 to take on the chair in Neuroscience of Language and Pragmatics.

Pulvermüller’s research has 4 main strands: At the theoretical level, he developed a neuromechanistic model of language, which builds upon the concept of strongly connected discrete and distributed neuronal circuits that form and interlink in the pre-structured cortical network based on Hebbian association and dissociation learning; he used this model to make predictions on brain activation during language and conceptual processing and on deficits arising from focal lesions. At the empirical-experimental level, his groups in Cambridge (2000-2011) and Berlin (2011-present) accumulated neuropsychological and neuroimaging evidence for category-specific semantic circuits distributed across several cortical areas, including modality-specific ones, and their recent neuropsychological studies even show that lesions in such areas, including motor cortex, cause specific semantic deficits. These experimental results provide support for the neuronal circuit model of language. To put these explanations on a mathematically-precise theoretical footing, Pulvermüller recently focuses on simulation studies with brain-constrained neural networks that mimic neuronal structure and connectivity in specific cortical areas of the human brain, in an attempt to model language learning and concept formation in brain-like environments. Finally, Pulvermüller uses his expertise in the neuroscience of language to develop novel translational methods for the therapy of aphasia following stroke.