Max Planck Institutes and Experts

China’s minorities policy draws no distinction between tiny groups that can be exoticized through folklore and peoples such as Tibetans, Mongols and Uyghurs with long civilizational histories. The condition of the Uyghurs improved in the 1980s, but deteriorated rapidly thereafter. The ”freedoms” of socialist market economy have rendered minority citizens second-class and put them under extreme pressure to assimilate. We document these macro-level developments on the basis of rural field research in the oasis of Qumul/Hami between 2006 and 2013.

A medieval church was a complex system in which spaces, objects and decorations provided the framework for the liturgy but also the scenario for a variety of other social activities. By integrating archaeometric analyses into research methods of archaeology and art history and with the help of digital technologies, a project of the Bibliotheca Hertziana investigates forms, functions and the aesthetics of medieval sacred spaces through digital mapping and 3D reconstructions.

Superficial white matter (SWM), a less than 1 mm thick interface between grey and white matter, contains most cortico-cortical white matter connections encompassing the short U-fibers. We developed an advanced neuroimaging method for SWM mapping in living individuals. Thereby we were able to show that the SWM contains significant amounts of iron. It is assumed that this iron is required for the myelination of the U-fibres. Our SWM mapping approach paves for systematic studies in the inter-individual differences, brain plasticity and pathologies in the human brain.

“Zivilcourage” is highly socially desirable in democratic societies, yet a lack thereof is often deplored. Systematic investigations paint strikingly different pictures on the prevalence of courageous interventions against others’ norm violations – depending on the methodological approach. The Research Group “Moral Courage” investigates psychological antecedents and barriers of this kind of behaviour. Our studies have shown that the ambiguity of a norm violation can be a strong inhibiting factor. However, some people incur costs to reduce ambiguity, and take informed decisions to intervene.

Although there is a great deal of research on vision and the processing of vision, still little is known about the processing of visual stimuli in higher brain areas. This is because an important research question has not been properly asked: the attentional selection of information. Certain brain areas coordinate where we direct our gaze; others decide what further information to retrieve and report back suggestions for interpreting the visual input. Our hypotheses set a new framework for future understanding of how vision works in our brains.