Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Ernst Poeppel, ML, MAE

Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Ernst Pöppel, ML, MAE

Ernst Pöppel, born in 1940, has studied psychology and biology in Freiburg, Munich (Germany) and in Innsbruck (Austria). He received his doctoral degree 1968, then a first habilitation in 1974 (sensory physiology), and a second habilitation in 1976 (psychology). He did research at Max-Planck-Institutes in Germany, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. At LMU Munich he founded in 1977 the Institute of Medical Psychology (IMP) in the Medical Faculty. He supervised more than 200 doctoral students; researchers in the IMP came from more than 40 countries. As Board Member of the National Research Center in Jülich from 1992 to 1997 (a semi-political position) he was responsible for Environmental Research and Life Sciences. He co-founded in 1997 the Human Science Center at LMU, an interdisciplinary and international institution with some 100 scientists from different countries. Since 2002 he is Guest Professor at the School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences of Peking University (PKU); recently he became Editor-in-Chief of the Chinese "PsyCh Journal". He is also member of the Board of Directors of the Federation of German Scientists. Ernst Pöppel has published more than 300 scientific articles, mainly on visual perception, temporal processing and biological aspects of aesthetics, and some 10 books for the general public. The motto of Ernst Pöppel on the political level is: "Scientists are natural ambassadors".

Ernst Pöppel is member of the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina ("ML"); he is also member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts (Salzburg), the Academia Europaea (London) (MAE), and the Russian Academy of Education Moscow). He holds an honorary degree of the Russian State University of the Humanities. He received the Bavarian Constitutional Medal in Silver for public service. He together with the American poet Fred Turner got the Levinson Award of the American Poetry Association for analyzing the temporal structure of poems. He has discovered the "blindsight" phenomenon which indicates that even in blindness visual information can be processed on an implicit level; this phenomenon has become also important for philosophical discourses as it sheds new light on what is meant with "consciousness". Furthermore, he has described "time windows" on different levels of temporal processing. It is shown that temporal processing in the brain (and in the mind) is not continuous but sequentially segmented. In particular, a "time window“ of some 3 seconds can be interpreted as representing the "subjective present".