Breaking Ground in Mental Health: New €6 Million Research Project led by Tobias Hauser
We are excited to share that our team has been awarded nearly €6 million in funding from the Wellcome Trust to investigate how the brain makes decisions—and why this process can become disrupted in mental illness. Every day, we make decisions both big and small. But for people with mental health conditions like schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), decision-making can become a major struggle. Some decide too quickly based on little evidence—a pattern known as “jumping to conclusions.” Others become stuck in doubt, unable to decide at all. Starting in February 2026, we will launch the largest study to date on these patterns. Using functional MRI, we will scan the brains of 150 people with schizophrenia and 150 with OCD to explore what happens in the brain when decisions go wrong. A key focus will be dopamine, a brain chemical that plays a crucial role in how we gather and process information before deciding. With both human data and mouse models, we aim to uncover how dopamine affects decision-making. This project brings together international experts …
