How do you turn thoughts into images?

Rainer Goebel is not only a scientist to the core. He is also in thrall to the romantic notion of science as an endeavour ‘to boldly go where no man has gone before,’ as his beloved series Star Trek put it. “Our project is a small moonshot,” he says, laughing. “Brain research can be compared to space travel in many ways. Visionary science definitely appeals to my imagination; that’s probably why I have such a soft spot for science fiction and technical gadgets. Science is also emotion.”

Goebel was appointed professor of neurocognition at UM in 2000, and director of the Brain Imaging Centre five years later. As a rising scientific star, it was expected that he would trade Maastricht for a renowned international institute—MIT, Stanford, Amsterdam—with an attractive new MRT scanner. After all, earlier attempts had been made to poach him from the Max Planck Institute, where he worked after his PhD. But Jo Ritzen, then university president, persuaded him to stay. 

“He promised that we’d get a state-of-the-art MRT scanner, which I could use to study areas of the brain that had previously been invisible. I was given the opportunity to go deeper still, to be a pioneer. That was one of the deciding factors. It was also important to me that I could more or less build something from scratch with a team. And the surrounding environment of Maastricht, close to Germany and Belgium, is very beautiful and inspiring. That’s important for a pleasure-seeker like me.”

As we chat over coffee at Bandito Espresso, he picks up on a melody in the background. “I remember this song from high school,” he says, smiling broadly. “This is ‘Stumblin' In,’ from the late seventies. All of a sudden it’s got a beat. Personally, I prefer rock music, though I once played trumpet in the village I grew up in.” Isn’t merely adapting music to modern tastes a sign of a lack of imagination? He laughs. “That touches on an essential part of my research. Imagination, or being able to form a mental image, is crucial. I want to find out how that process works in the brain. As far as originality is concerned, I think that as a scientist you have to be creative. I never do the same thing over and over again. Science also means taking risks; you have to get out of your comfort zone. Nobody’s going to quote you if all you do is what others have done before. It’s about passion. I want to be a pioneer.”