Singer, Wolf

Wolf Singer is regarded as one of the most distinguished neuroscientists in the world. His field of work at the Frankfurt Max Planck Institute for Brain Research (Max-Planck-Institut für Hirnforschung / MPIH), where he is a director, is the so-called binding problem. How does our decentrally organised brain construct a coherent total picture of the world in split seconds out of all the parallel concurrent processes of perception – and so give me the feeling that I exist?

Wolf Singer did not become a brain researcher by his own free choice. That at least is what we must say if we accept his thesis. The 65 year-old scientist cannot believe in free will in the classical sense. „It must be assumed that someone does what he does because his brain, in just that instant, could not have come to any other decision”, says Singer. „The assumption that we could in this instant have decided otherwise is untenable from a neurobiological point of view.”

Freedom without possibility?

Singer has drawn much criticism for such assertions. Philosophers scent a betrayal of the Enlightenment idea of freedom. Jurists see threatened the rule of law, which decisively rests on the idea of an agent’s responsibility. „I said only that our capacities and achievements rest on neuronal processes, which operate consciously or unconsciously”, sums up the researcher. „No one today can any longer seriously question that.”

For Singer, every individual remains the author of his deeds and can therefore be called to account for them. But there is „no mind that hovers over the neurons” and can revise decisions at the last minute. Our will is an „option room” which, depending on outer or inner constraints such as laws or psychological disturbances, private memories or cultural influences, can be narrower or broader. „A cold-blooded murderer simply has the bad luck to have a low threshold for killing”, says Singer. For precisely this reason society must protect itself against him. The alternative is not criminal anarchy, but another, socially defined concept of law.

Mind is matter

For the decision to take up his profession Singer is indebted to the neuronal imprinting of his parents – and a lucky accident. As the son of a doctor, he wanted to study medicine in Munich. Then he attended a seminar on the neuro-physiological foundations of schizophrenia. The attempt to explain mental phenomena by processes that could be studied by the natural sciences, says Singer, strongly influenced his choice of profession. In 1975 he took his habilitation in physiology at the Technical University of Munich.

Singer has been director of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt am Main since 1981. He is regarded as one of the most distinguished experts in his field. He sits on the board of editors of about 50 neuroscientific journals, and as a member of the Papal Academy of the Sciences now and again advises the Vatican. Currently, two pharmacological employers are contributing 200 million euros to found an institute for Singer in Frankfurt which is designed to combine the scientific competence of the MPIH with the freedom of private financing.

Singer is working on a solution of the „binding problem”: this would be an answer to the question how the hundred billion nerve cells in our head, with their 100,000,000,000,000 connections with the most diverse sensory stimuli, construct a coherent total picture of reality in split seconds. For Singer, the brain is a highly complex system in which, from an objective point of view, no ordering centre can be detected. Singer likes to speak of a „thought orchestra without a conductor” when he explains this to laymen. „Our perceptions are the result of very distributed, parallel sub-processes that are connected to each other in a miraculous way”, says Singer. He wants to decipher how the miracle works.

State of mind changes with the wind

What does a brain researcher think about when he is not thinking about the brain? „That depends on the weather”, says Singer, and laughs. „If it’s snowing, I want to go out straightaway into the snow.” He is an enthusiastic skier because he used to have to ski to school as a boy from his Bavarian village. For Singer, it is just such childhood experiences that can guide an entire life. He therefore thinks that the significance of upbringing cannot be overestimated. „The formation of brain functions is essentially co-determined by experiences and learning”, he says. „Teacher and educator are not only responsible for passing on cultural contents, but also shape behaviour for life.”

Singer’s family is exemplary for the role parents play in the neuronal shaping process. One of his twin daughters has followed in the footsteps of her mother, a radio editor, as a professor for experimental radio. The other has become a brain researcher in Zurich. Originally a psychologist, she wanted, as Singer emphasizes, „to get far away from daddy”. She then somehow „slipped into” neuroscience just like her father. Tania Singer’s speciality is the „social brain”: the study of those brain functions that arise only through dialogue with other brains and could never develop in an isolated brain. Thus the daughter’s research begins where the father’s ends.

The soul of a ten euro note

In addition to the binding problem, the question of the „social brain” is for Singer the great challenge in his field. „A ten euro note has no value in itself”, says the neuroscientist. „Its value consists in an agreement, which hovers over it.” What makes homo sapiens invent value systems and sets of rules, and so culture and society? How do feelings like happiness and empathy, which cannot be measured by a voltmeter, arise? And why do the things that are hardest to grasp concentrate themselves in a word like „God” which becomes so powerful in the dialogue among brains that something material like the Cologne Cathedral arises?

Singer calls these points, which are directed to the subjective and social questions of his work and cannot perhaps be explained by his discipline alone, the „Body-Soul-Problem”. „Everything is connected” is his view. „And we have to see to it that we set up these bridges between everything.”

The canny researcher quite deliberately leaves somewhat open the question whether or not his dispensing with a free will is finally the right approach.

Ob dabei sein Verzicht auf einen freien Willen letztlich der richtige Ansatz ist, lässt der kluge Forscher ganz bewusst ein wenig offen.