Donders Institute

Donders Wonders Blog

This post is also available in Dutch.

The Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour (the Donders for short) is a research institute at Radboud Univeristy in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Researchers at the Donders study the many mysteries of mind and brain, and of the behavior they produce. They do so at all levels of scale: from molecule to man. Around 500 scientists, technicians and support staff go to work at the Donders each day. Together, they try to bring us closer to understanding the brain.

F.C. Donders
Not a football club, but Franciscus Cornelis Donders. That’s the man after whom our institute was named. F.C. Donders lived in the nineteenth century and was professor of medicine and physiology at Utrecht. His specialty was opthalmology, but he also thought deeply about mental processes. The most important thing Donders taught us is that even the most complex mental functions (like seeing or making a decision) consist in sequences of many simple functions. By studying these underlying processes, we can begin to build theories of complex behavior. This is the scientific foundation for the research at the Donders Institute.

More information
Official website of the Donders Institute (in Dutch)

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