The original plan in life was to raise horses and to be responsible for a farm, but that plan could not be fulfilled because of external reasons; the second world war changed everything in the original life trajectory.

The smell of horses still gives me the feeling of being at home. The olfactory system is fundamental for our memories. When returning 30 years later my first social space was recognized by the smell.

Another event relevant for neural processing: An injury on the right hand at an early age made me a left-hander in sports, although not in writing or playing golf. The plasticity of the brain during early development is amazing. We enter the world with genetic programs of possibilities like becoming a right-handed person, but early learning can re-program such neural programs.

With no ground under the feet any more becoming a refugee an attempt was made with water under the feet. This project in the navy did not work out, but the experiences on the sailing ship Gorch Fock, a very special social space, are unforgettable.

The real scientific journey started in the Max-Planck-Institute of Behavioral Physiology in Seewiesen and Erling-Andechs, Germany. An important person for me in this social space was Konrad Lorenz, one of the founders of modern ethology, the discoverer of "imprinting", who actually was once professor in Königsberg, or Kaliningrad now. With Lorenz I  learned about anthropological universals, or innate releasing patterns, i.e. behavioral patterns that unite all humans, in a complementary way to cultural specifics. What makes us different, what unites us? 

Unfortunately, I never met Erich von Holst. His concept of the reafference principle is central for our work today. For whatever we do, we have a copy in our brain which is meant to be matched by external information. We regularly visit his graveyard  for his memory.

Besides being a great scientists he also was building violins and violas. He is, thus, also an example of a researcher bringing art and science together.

Now I move to the MIT (Massachuesetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, USA). When I still was at the Max-Planck-Institute of Behavioral Physiology there came as a visitor the provost of MIT and he asked what everybody is doing. I said that I study the diurnal rhythm of time perception.  He said that at MIT somebody has solved the problem already:

At MIT I entered a new social space of high inter-disciplinarity. The director was Hans-Lukas Teuber who got some special "imprinting" from Alexander Luria in Moscow; being now Teuber's student I suddenly became a scientific grandson of Luria.

Research at MIT was dedicated to the visual system, in particular the early visual pathway. I was lucky to discover a phenomenon which later was named "blindsight". This observation opened the eyes to different knowledge systems, i.e. in addition to explicit knowledge (usually represented in language) we have to deal also with the system of implicit or tacit knowledge.

When we navigate through the world we rely mainly on the implicit knowledge system; without consciously “seeing”, we know where we are.

Now I find myself in my journey between social spaces in Russia. I got to know Victor Shklovsky who has set up the "Center for Speech Pathology and Neurorehabilitation" in Moscow. This is in my view the best center in the world to deal with brain injured patients.

I had several opportunities over the years to present ideas about "blindsight" and temporal processing. This center is a unique social space of taking care of patients, also in their personal environment.

It was in the early seventies last century when I worked in the Max-Planck-Institute of Psychiatry in Munich when a visitor came from the Pawlow-Institute near St Petersburg. It was Nikita Podvigin who discovered neural oscillations in the visual pathway with periods of some 30 milliseconds.

There was only one "mistake": He published in Russian, and others did not know about it. Years later, after his publications, neural oscillations were "re-discovered" and reported in another language. Now it has become a fashion to work on oscillations in different frequency domains.

What are these oscillations good for described by Podvigin? They can serve the purpose for complexity reduction of visual input which is physically ill-defined in the temporal domain. The concept is that one period defines a system state within which the before-after relationship of sensory input is not defined; thus, temporal integration for ill-defined stimuli is made possible.

Many years ago I was visiting Kaliningrad and also Svedlogorsk (formerly Rauschen) at the Baltic Sea. At the university in Kaliningrad Vera Zabotkina organized within less than a day a lecture for me, and I was impressed that students spoke German. I suddenly was in a different social space. The German novelist Thomas Mann stayed for some time in Svedlogorsk before he moved to a house in Nidden.

His point is that prior to a local feature analysis, the visual brain extracts topological invariants like edges, surfaces, or holes. As is normal in scientific debates, colleagues have problems with that concept and argue about it; people do not like necessarily new paradigms.

Years ago I walked along the Charles River in Cambridge (the river being another social space) with Thomas Kuhn from MIT discussing with him the concept of "scientific paradigms" in his book "the structure of scientific revolutions", a book highly recommended.

The data that Lin Chen presents are convincing, but when will they reach others? His discovery is indeed fundamental in cognitive science but beyond the border of the paradigmatic dogma.

Being in the Chinese social space now I experience and have experienced another scientific paradigm we have to deal with. It has been shown that cognitive processes are embedded in a pre-semantic time window of a few seconds.

The journey between these personal social spaces has come to an end; it has brought me from Germany to the US, to Russia, to China. Many scientific questions remain open. What remains, however, is that on the basis of personal trust and friendship we work together; in the ideal case we follow one goal which is a better understanding of the

To bring art and science together to a "smARTSCIENCE" is one of the great challenges and also joy in the joint work of Prof. Yan Bao (in the center) and myself. We work closely together with LaoZHU (or Prof. ZHU Qingsheng, on the right)) from Peking University who is both an art historian and an artist. He is a representative of the "third abstraction", and we did some research with his artwork; these are picture we used in our experiments, and we published our results in the "PsyCh Journal" (see below). LaoZhu got his Ph.D. degree many years ago in the university of Heidelberg in Germany. Besides his career as an artist and in academia he is also active at present as president of the "Comité international d'histoire de l'art" (CIHA) in Paris."

Prof. Lin CHEN, member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has developed a theory of visual perception that opens a new perspective of brain functions in general. Paradoxically he is sitting in my office at a recent visit below a picture showing a "brain on crutches". This is my reminder to be modest with respect to progress in brain research. To the left of this brain picture is a small aquarell which I got from Nikita Chruschtschow, the grandson of the Russian politician, when he was guest scientist. Below this picture are sitting two medical doctoral students, Jana von Trott zu Solz (left) and Areso Formuli (whose family came from Kabul in Afghanistan). To my right is Dr. Taoxi YANG, my former doctoral student, now joining Prof. Semir Zeki in the University College London, and to her right the doctoral student Nan MU funded by the Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC), and then Morteza Izadifar from Iran, another doctoral student, funded by the Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung in Bavaria.

Prof. ZHANG Jianxin from the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IPCAS), in Beijing, and Prof. Ernst PÖPPEL from the Institute of Medical Psychology and the Human Science Center, Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, are both Editors-in-Chief of the „PsyCh Journal“, China’s premier international psychology journal.

The journal is published by WILEY and the IPCAS.

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One of the most important presidents of Peking University was Prof. Yuanpei CAI (1863-1940), who had studied in Leipzig with Wilhelm Wundt in 1907.

His statue on the campus of Peking University is always decorated with flowers.

On the basis of his German experiences he introduced psychology as a new field at Peking University, where he was president from 1916 until 1927. 

Interview im Magazin FOCUS, Ausgabe 43, vom 22. Oktober 2016. Sie können das vollständige Interview über den nebenstehenden Download-Button herunterladen.