How to reconcile brain and mind?

Excerpt

This special issue is published in honor of Prof. Dr. Frank Rösler. It consists of papers presented during a symposium on the occasion of his retirement at the Phillipps-University Marburg, Germany, in January 2009. The topic of the symposium was “How to reconcile brain and mind?” and addressed the question of how two views of the presumably same ontological entity may be unified. While the first view, i.e. the view from brain research, provides a description of the functions of the brain in terms of anatomical structure and neurophysiological processes, the second view, i.e. the view from psychology, describes basic processes of the mind and human behavior often in less objective terms and on a more macroscopic level, e.g. perception, attention, memory, etc. Psychological and brain sciences as well as philosophy have strived for a long time to identify the function which would allow to superimpose or to unify both levels of description. This has also been the main driving force behind the scientific work of Frank Rösler. From the very beginning of his academic career, Frank Rösler has tried to understand psychological (cognitive) processes by investigating their relation to neurophysiological processes (see Rösler, 2011). In his first book which was published in 1982 he described a research program which he referred to as “Cognitive Psychophysiology” (Rösler, 1982) and which to some extend anticipated what is called “Cognitive Neuroscience” today. …