Research – Find your way by searching the unknown

Abstract

For this talk I was asked to first describe my research and my personal academic way and to second give advice for young researchers. Reflecting on this demand I became aware that the first part is fairly easy but the second part not. One reason for this is that at the beginning of my studies I could not imagine what it would be like to be a "scientist" and what it means to do "research". Therefore I have to say that I did not "plan" my academic career but I rather did what I was interested in. Right from the beginning I wanted to better understand how the central nervous system and especially the brain controls our muscles and allows execution and acquisition of (complex) movements. However, it was only by coincidence that in 2003 I had the chance to work in the department of neurology in Freiburg, Germany, to learn the handling of neurophysiological methods such as transcranial magnetic stimulation, peripheral nerve stimulation, etc. In the following, I applied these methods in order to investigate postural control and balance training and presented the work at the ECSS conference in Clermont-Ferrand, France, in 2004. At this time we demonstrated that fast, probably monosynaptic corticospinal projections are involved when regaining balance after postural disturbances (later published as paper: Taube et al. 2006). This work was awarded with the Young Investigator Award so that I was invited to join the JSPFSM-ECSS exchange symposium in Tokyo, where I had the opportunity to discover Japan for the first time in my life.After I have spent 20 great days in Japan, I was more than ever determined to work as a scientist as this means not only to uncover new insights in a specific research area but also do discover new countries and cultures. In the following, I added an additional focus to my research -the aim to explore the neural control of stretch shortening cycle movements. The studies we did in this field are summarized in a recent review article .Another interest of research we follow up since some years is the influence of feedback (sensory and augmented feedback) on motor performance and motor learning. In this context, we identified basic mechanisms for instance by showing that the interpretation of feedback influences motor performance (fatigue resistance) and motor cortical contribution (Lauber et al. 2013, Lauber et al. 2012 or the ability of humans to make choice reaction tasks based on subliminal and thus unconscious cues ). However, we also addressed applied topics such as the influence of augmented feedback on the performance and training outcome of stretchshortening cycle movements (Keller et al. submitted). Furthermore, we compared the effect of augmented feedback with the effects of an external and internal focus of attention (Keller et al. in preparation). These latter studies are especially helpful when optimizing training regimes.From my personal experience I would advise young researchers to search for the bridge of basic and applied research. The detection of basic mechanisms is important and ...