What agile working means for Gerhard Roth in the eighth decade of his life was most recently shown when he founded the Roth Institute.

"Under the direction of the renowned brain researcher Prof. Dr.

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Gerhard Roth, we offer effective solutions for all aspects of leadership, agile working, personality diagnostics and opportunity management through advice, lectures and seminars," says the self-portrayal of the institute based in Bremen and Murten, Switzerland.

A course on "Integrative Neuro-Coaching", for example, is aimed "at people who have already completed coaching training and want to put their practice on a neuroscientific basis and expand their toolbox with proven effective methods."

Christian Geyer Hindemith

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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This is how Neuro-Roth, as he is called in contrast to the poet of the same name, hits the training industry, which awarded him the Life Achievement Award (LAA), its highest honor, in 2019.

In the Roth Institute, the tools can be tapped with which the increase in the efficiency of human resources appears to be determinable.

Its managing director Sebastian Herbst connects the prospect of growth with one of the few available portraits of Gerhard Roth: “He is very multifaceted and not only has brains, but also heart.

This is particularly evident in his dealings with colleagues, customers and students.

I always find him to be very trusting and helpful.

And in addition to the scientific side, he also has a subtle one.

So he is culturally and musically very well versed,

Brain-friendly learning?

As a brain researcher with a doctorate not only in zoology but also in philosophy, Roth resists anyone who takes him for a neuroscientific reductionist.

He is not, writes the long-standing professor of behavioral physiology at the University of Bremen in his most recent book "Über den Menschen", in any case he is not a reductionist of the brute type.

In this work, Roth attempts to mediate between brain research that appears more imperialistic and suspends hermeneutic approaches on the one hand and its critics in the humanities on the other.

Despite the sharpness of their criticism, according to Roth, "it must be conceded that they often drew attention to serious gaps in content or at least deficiencies in neuroscientific presentations".

Book titles that express the spirit of a closed neuroscientific anthropology in their conciseness suggest that Roth himself could have promoted such a one-dimensional approach to “the” people: “How the brain makes the soul”, “Freedom, Guilt and Responsibility.

Fundamentals of a naturalistic theory of free will”, “feeling, thinking, acting.

How the brain controls our behavior”.

Regarding this impression of his critics, Roth writes in "Über den Menschen" that he has always "tried to avoid a brutally reductionist point of view", which, of course, "was not always noticed".

In the book “Schule mit Köpfchen”, which he co-authored and which is due out next week, the head stands for the brain;

as if there were "brain-friendly" teaching and learning,

Is brain research adorned with foreign feathers?

Roth is familiar with such objections and knows how to counter them in advance by claiming methodical inclusion;

Programmatically, this is reflected in the formulation of a – so literally – “psycho-neuroscientific” approach.

Empirical-experimental psychology offers the neuroscientifically adorned school appearance its data basis.

Roth succinctly explains that such knowledge cannot be separated from psychological findings, thus raising the question of what is the added value of a brain-friendly learning theory that is not already covered in motivation and memory research.

To put it another way: does brain research adorn itself with foreign feathers when it wants to enlighten one discipline after the other about itself?

Roth is confident enough not to describe this criticism from the disciplines, from economics to criminology to education, as absurd from the outset.

Today, Monday, he turns eighty.