The aim of the work of his neurophysiological department is to elucidate the neuronal processes in the case of so-called higher cognitive performance, such as in the case of visual perception, in memory, or in other ways of cognition. In his institute, among other things, the emergence of visual disorder
amblyopia is also being studied. In the neurophysiological research community, Singer is internationally known for his research and reflections on the physiological basis of attention and identification procedures. The institute, with its technically elaborate experiments, is primarily concerned with the
binding problem, where the question is at the center of how different sensory aspects of an object – form, color, hardness, weight, smell, etc. - can be combined into a single object experience. The theory is based, among others, on the works by
Christoph von der Malsburg. It attaches great importance to the temporal synchronicity of neuronal activity in the
cortex. Corresponding oscillator frequencies of the nerve cells would then refer to the same object, while other frequencies would mark other objects. Singer represents a naturalistic interpretation of neurophysiological data and strives to make the results of brain research known to the public. Singer is a board member of the
Mind & Life Institute. He has also researched the neuroscience of
meditation in partnership with
Matthieu Ricard.
Free will and guilt Singer, like
Gerhard Roth, became the focus of public discussions in Germany through interviews, lectures and popular science essays regarding the consequences of neurological research to political and juridical, psychological and developmental psychology, pedagogical or anthropological, as well as architectural or urban questions and even to historical and philosophical views. His thesis on the
free will was particularly controversial. Singer declined to speak of a free will. This he expressed publicly in an article published in the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 2004, whose subtitling he made in the slightly modified formulation "Brain structures determine us: We should stop talking about free will" as the main title of the reprinting of an extensive scientific contribution to the discussion "Brain as a Subject? (Part I)" in the German
Journal of Philosophy. Singer argues that the natural 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 as
Peter Bieri argue, however, that the notion of freedom of will is only under certain conditions contrary to determinism and that these assumptions need not to be accepted. Singer also demands that the lack of free will must have consequences for our conceptions of guilt and punishment: if no one can decide freely from a scientific point of view, it is not useful to make people responsible for their actions. Socially intolerable persons would have to be "locked away" and "subjected to specific educational programs". In 2004, Wolf Singer was one of the authors of
Das Manifest, a declaration of eleven leading neuroscientists on the presence and future of brain research, published in the magazine
Gehirn & Geist. == Honors and awards ==