Detlef Heck, Ph.D.

Professor, Biomedical Sciences - Duluth

E-MAIL: [email protected]

Advising Statement

Research Interests:

Our laboratory is trying to understand how brain areas communicate, what controls that communication during behavior and how breathing influences brain activity and function in healthy and diseased brains. No brain area operates in isolation. Short- and long-range connections form complex networks that enable brain areas to collaborate in a context-dependent manner, responding to internal and external cues to promote survival optimizing behavior. The neocortex and the cerebellum are two key players in this concert. They are reciprocally connected via massive fiber bundles and have both jointly and proportionately increased in size during vertebrate evolution. One focus of our research is to investigate the neuronal mechanisms of cerebrocerebellar interaction to understand the involvement of the cerebellum in cognitive functions in healthy brains and the link between cerebellar neuropathology and cognitive disorders such as autism and schizophrenia.

Our second research focus is on the role of breathing in organizing brain activity through respiration-coupled neuronal rhythms. We were the first to report that breathing, via olfactory bulb activity, rhythmically modulates neuronal activity in the neocortex outside of the olfactory system. Our results also showed that the power of high-frequency (40-100Hz) gamma oscillations is modulated in phase with breathing. Gamma oscillations are strongly implicated with cognitive function, which led us to suggest that breathing may directly influence cognitive functions. Brain-breath coupling has since developed into a rapidly growing new research field. Our focus continues to be on the neuronal mechanisms underlying respiratory modulation of neuronal activity in different brain areas, implications of brain-breath coupling for cognitive functions, mental health, and the development of breath-based treatments. 
 

Publications

For a complete publication list see: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/detlef.heck.1/bibliography/public/

  • Lee AS, Arefin TM, Gubanova A, Stephen DN, Liu Y, Lao Z, Krishnamurthy A, De Marco García NV, Heck DH, Zhang J, Rajadhyasksha AM, Joyner AL (2025) Cerebellar output neurons impair non-motor behaviors by altering development of extracerebellar connectivity, Nature Communications 16:1858
  • Saltafossi M, Heck DH, Kluger DS, Varga S (2025) Common threads: Altered interoceptive processes across affective and anxiety disorders. Journal of Affective Disorders 369, 244-254
  • Kim LH, Heck DH, Sillitoe RV (2024) Cerebellar functions beyond movement and learning. Annual Review of Neuroscience Vol 47
  • Beckinghausen J, Ortiz-Guzman J, Lin T, Bachman B, Salazar Leon LE, Liu Y, Heck DH, Arenkiel BR,  Sillitoe RV (2023) The cerebellum contributes to generalized seizures by altering activity in the ventral posteromedial nucleus. Communications Biology 6 (1), 731
  • Brændholt M, Kluger DS, Varga S, Heck DH, Gross J, Allen M (2023), Breathing in waves: Understanding Respiratory-Brain Coupling as a Gradient of Predictive Oscillations. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 105262
  • Heck DH, Fox MB, Correia BL, McAfee SS, Liu L (2023) Cerebellar control of thalamocortical circuits for cognitive function: a review of pathways and a proposed mechanism, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, Vol. 17, March 2023
  • Allen M, Varga S, Heck DH (2022) Respiratory Rhythm of the Predictive Mind. Psychological Review 130 (4), 1066
  • Heck DH, Varga S (2022) “The great mixing machine”: multisensory integration and brain‑breath coupling in the cerebral cortex. European J. Physiology 475 (1), 5-11.
  • Heck DH, Correia BL, Fox MB, Liu L, Allen M, Varga S (2022) Recent insights into respiratory modulation of brain activity offer new perspectives on cognition and emotion. Biological Psychology, Invited Review, Volume 170, 108316
  • Liu Y, McAfee SS, Van Der Heijden ME, Dhamala M, Sillitoe RV, Heck DH (2022) Causal evidence for a cerebellar role in prefrontal-hippocampal interaction in spatial working memory decision-making, The Cerebellum doi: 10.1007/s12311-022-01383-7. (e-pub ahead of print)
  • McAfee SS, Liu Y, Sillitoe RV, Heck DH (2022) Cerebellar coordination of neuronal communication in the cerebral cortex. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience 15:781527. doi: 10.3389/fnsys.2021.781527.
  • Taylor AP, Goedecke PJ, Tolley EA, Lee AS, Joyner AL, Heck DH (2022) Conditional loss of Engrailed1/2 in Atoh1-derived excitatory cerebellar nuclear neurons impairs eupneic respiration in mice. Genes, Brain and Behavior 21(2):e12788. doi: 10.1111/gbb.12788
  • Liu Y, Qi S, Thomas F, Correia BL, Taylor AP, Sillitoe RV, Heck DH (2020) Loss of cerebellar function selectively affects intrinsic rhythmicity of eupneic breathing. Biology Open 9(4)
     
Detlef Heck