Wolf Singer

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Wolf Singer (October 2008)
Singer (2012)

Wolf Joachim Singer (born March 9, 1943 in Munich ) is a German neurophysiologist and brain researcher .

Life

Wolf Singer studied from 1962 (from 1965 on a scholarship from the Study Foundation of the German People ) Medicine at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU Munich) and 1965/66 two semesters in Paris . In 1968 he was awarded a PhD at LMU Munich with the work The Function of Telencephalic Commissures for Bilateral Synchronization of the EEG , which he had written under Otto Detlev Creutzfeldt at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry. med. PhD. During his further training in neurophysiology , he also spent a training period at the University of Sussex in England in 1971 .

In 1975 he qualified as a professor at the medical faculty of the Technical University of Munich in physiology . In 1981 he was appointed a member of the Max Planck Society and Director of the Department of Neurophysiology at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt am Main . Here he founded the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS) and the Brain Imaging Center (BIC) together with Walter Greiner and Horst Stöcker in 2004 , and in 2006 the Ernst Strüngmann Science Forum and the Ernst Strüngmann Institute (ESI). He is an honorary professor of physiology. Since 2011 he has had the status of emeritus and as such continues to lead the “Singer-Emeritus-Department” at the MPI Frankfurt.

Wolf Singer is the father of brain researcher Tania Singer and media scientist Nathalie Singer .

Act

Research topics

The aim of the work in his neurophysiological department is to elucidate the neuronal processes involved in so-called higher cognitive performance, such as visual perception, remembering or other intellectual performance. Research is carried out in his institute u. a. also the development of the visual disturbance amblyopia .

In the neurophysiological research community, Singer is internationally u. a. known for his research and considerations on the physiological basis of attention and identification processes. The bond problem , i.e. the question of how the impression of the perception of a uniform object (which is perceived as the carrier of all these sensually perceptible properties) can be constructed from different sensory impressions of properties (such as shape, color, hardness, weight, smell), investigates this Institute with technically complex experiments mainly in the area of ​​visual perception. The theory for this comes from Christoph von der Malsburg , among others . She attaches great importance to the temporal synchronicity of neural activity in the cortex. Corresponding oscillation frequencies of the nerve cells would therefore refer to the same objects.

Singer advocates a naturalistic interpretation of neurophysiological data and tries to make the results of brain research known to the public and to represent them.

Singer is one of the scientists involved in the Mind-and-Life dialogues; he is mentioned on the Mind and Life Institute website as one of the Science & Contemplative Affiliates .

Freedom and guilt

Like Gerhard Roth , Singer was repeatedly at the center of public debates through his pointed statements in interviews, lectures and popular science essays. His conclusions from neuroscientific research with regard to political and legal , psychological and developmental psychological and educational or anthropological , but also z. B. architectural or urban planning issues to such historical and philosophical - ideological nature like to be picked up by the press.

His theses on free will were particularly controversial . Singer refused to speak of free will . He publicly expressed this in 2004 in a FAZ article, the subtitle of which he defined in the slightly modified formulation interconnections: We should stop talking about freedom on the main title of the reprint of an extensive scientific article on the specialist discussion “The brain as a subject? (Part I) ”in the German magazine for philosophy . Singer argues that the scientific causal model, according to which the world is to be viewed as a closed deterministic whole , excludes freedom. Proponents of the concept of freedom such as Peter Bieri , however, object that the concept of free will only stands in opposition to determinism under certain conditions and that these conditions do not have to be accepted.

Singer also demands that the lack of free will must have consequences for our conceptions of guilt and punishment : If, from a scientific point of view, nobody can decide freely, it makes no sense to hold people responsible for their actions. Nevertheless, one must protect oneself from them and first of all prevent the person concerned from repeating his act. "So we would lock up criminals and subject them to certain educational programs that would also include sanctions." - so on literally - "We would do pretty much the same as we are now. The only way of looking at things would have changed. "Singer imagines," that our dealings with people who we now call >> criminals << could become more understanding - without, however, our penal system having fundamentally changed. "

Wolf Singer and Gerhard Roth were co-authors of “Das Manifest”, a sensational declaration by - according to the editors' wording - eleven leading neuroscientists on the present and future of brain research , which was published in autumn 2004 in the journal Brain & Spirit .

honors and awards

Wolf Singer has received numerous honors for his scientific work and his commitment beyond that. a. the Ernst Jung Prize for Science and Research , the Neuronal Plasticity Prize , the Zülch Prize , the Max Planck Prize for Public Relations , the Hessian Culture Prize in 1998 , the Communicator Prize of the Stifterverband for German Science , the honorary doctorate from the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg and the Médaille de la Ville de Paris . In 1989 he was accepted as a full member of the Academia Europaea . He has been a member of the Leopoldina since 1998 and of the German Academy for Language and Poetry since 2003 .

He was also awarded the Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur in France . In 1992 Singer was made a lifelong member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Rome. In 2002 he received the Ernst Hellmut Vits Prize from the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster ( Westphalia ).

Singer was a member of the scientific advisory board of the Giordano Bruno Foundation until 2012 . He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Hertie Foundation . Since 2007 he has been a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences .

In 2011 he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit, First Class . In the same year Pope Benedict XVI appointed him . as a member of the Pontifical Council for Culture . In 2013, the Leopoldina awarded him the Cothenius Medal . Also in 2013 he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science . He was elected to EMBO in 2014 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2017 .

Works (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ MPI Emeriti .
  2. ^ Singer Emeritus Department
  3. ↑ mpibrainresearch .
  4. ↑ Nathalie Singer at the University of Weimar .
  5. ↑ Interview with Wolf Singer , published in “Die Welt” on October 28, 1991 under the title “The researcher is a bogeyman in Germany”.
  6. ↑ Petra Gehring states in chap. 9 of her book What is biopower? (Campus, Frankfurt 2006) with the title Brain Research and Power: From Free Will to Criminal Law Policy. on p. 194, brain research is “not least a case for media sociology”.
  7. ↑ In: Christian Geyer: Hirnforschung und Willensfreiheit . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2004 p. 30
  8. ↑ Its title there was self-awareness and neurobiological external description .
  9. ↑ Carl Friedrich Gethmann argues in his article The experience of the authorship of actions and the findings of the neurosciences in: Dieter Sturma (ed.): Philosophy and Neurosciences (Suhrkamp, ​​ffm. 2006) pp. 215-239 even for the fact that it even occurs in the freedom discussion not about our free will; in reality, the causalist explanatory paradigm is in question, which is unquestionably presupposed. Dirk Hartmann explained in 1998 in Philosophical Foundations of Psychology ( Memento of November 26, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) (WBG, Darmstadt; PDF; 17.1 MB) p. 327 that it is in the natural sciences through an “ontological hypostatization” came to the misinterpretation of the causal principle : this is actually a so-called research-leading "methodological norm", which is mostly realistically understood as a causal law and is thought of as a basis in naturalistic metaphysics of the world as a whole (in physics even by the "unity thesis" tightened, according to which there should be no exception to this assumed or hypostatized "law of nature"); see. Hartmann's contribution physis and psyche. The mind-body problem as a result of hypostatizing theoretical constructs. in: Dieter Sturma (Ed.): Philosophy and Neurosciences. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2006 ( stw 1770 ) pp. 97–123.
  10. ↑ A new image of man? (Suhrkamp, ​​Ffm. 2003) pp. 33/34.
  11. ^ Co-authors: Christian E. Elger , Angela D. Friederici , Christof Koch , Heiko Luhmann , Christoph von der Malsburg , Randolf Menzel , Hannah Monyer , Frank Rösler , Gerhard Roth (biologist) and Henning Scheich .
  12. ↑ Directory of members: Wolf Singer. Academia Europaea, accessed July 19, 2017 .
  13. ^ Member entry of Wolf Singer at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on April 11, 2015.
  14. ^ Singer , vatican.va.
  15. ^ Personnel changes in the foundation committees , newsletter of the Giordano Bruno Foundation, September 6, 2012, accessed on November 22, 2013.
  16. ↑ s. RINUNCE E NOMINE dated December 10, 2011; under point 3 "NOMINA DI CONSULTORI DEL PONTIFICIO CONSIGLIO DELLA CULTURA"
  17. ^ Fellows of the AAAS: Wolf Singer. Retrieved January 26, 2018 .
  18. ↑ EMBO enlarges its membership for 50th anniversary. Press release from May 8, 2014 at the Science Information Service (idw-online.de).
  19. ↑ an article as mentioned above in the printed version with the programmatic subtitle appeared interconnections commit ourselves. We should stop talking about freedom. In reality, it is an excerpt from this part ( ) of a much more extensive article, which shortly afterwards m. d. T. Self-experience and neurobiological external description ( ) in DZPhil 52, 2, 2004: 235–255, was published. This specialist article, in turn, was made available to the general public in its entirety in the same year, but not under its original title, but under the title: Interconnections set us. We should stop talking about freedom . (see next entry)
  20. ↑ a TB of the Edition Suhrkamp series (No. 2387), in which this FAZ editor documents the extremely extensive debate in the FAZ (including some articles that were published elsewhere independently ), based on the principle of paradoxical interventions . Singer has the marketing of his work documented here ; s. also the introductory remarks on an open letter on the original FAZ article.
  21. ↑ review here ( a. Here ); Singer's reaction to this, including the reply from the reviewer here and his closing remarks on a massive discussion with links to the contributions of other discussion partners here .
personal data
SURNAME Singer, wolf
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Singer, Wolf Joachim (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German brain researcher
DATE OF BIRTH March 9, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich