System neuroscience: past, present and future

Il 14/07/2017 ore 12.00 - 13.00

Sala Conferenze Cnr, Area della Ricerca Na1, Via P. Castellino, 111 80131 Napoli

Prof. Giacomo Rizzolatti from the Dipartimento di Medicina e Chirurgia, Università di Parma will give a talk that will consist of two parts. In the first he will make a brief historically survey of two ages of cognitive neuroscience. The first – the golden age- corresponds essentially to the second half of the last century. It is the period when, thanks to the development of single neuron recording in behaving animals, our understanding of nervous system moved from mere knowledge of localization of basic functions to comprehension of mechanisms underlying them. The second one- the enthusiasm age- is related to the appearance of brain imaging techniques (PET and fMRI) and the possibility to observe brain activations in awake human beings. In spite of great enthusiasm that these techniques raised, conceptually brain imaging investigations were essentially localization studies, simply complementing the old lesion studies. Nothing in term of mechanism could be learned, nothing about the timing of cortical activations. In the last part of his talk Prof Rizzolatti will show how limitations in spatial and temporal resolution of available imaging techniques can be overcome using stereo EEG, provided that a very large set of data is available. He will present a few examples of how, by using this technique, highly resolved four dimensional maps of human cortical processes could be obtained, providing a new, deeper view on how the brain works.   

Prof Rizzolatti was born in Kiev, in the former Soviet Union. He made his University studies in Padua where he graduated in Medicine and obtained the specialization in Neurology. He spent then three years at the University of Pisa at the Institute of Physiology, directed at that time by Prof. Giuseppe Moruzzi.

His subsequent academic carrier took place mostly at the University of Parma where he started as an Assistant in Human Physiology and became Full Professor of Human Physiology, which is his present academic position.

He spent one year in the Department of Psychology of the McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada and one year, as a Visiting Professor, in the Department of Anatomy of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Since the early nineties Prof. Rizzolatti is having a close collaboration with the Department of Computer Science and Neuroscience of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles and with Ahmanson Lovelace Brain Mapping Center of UCLA, Los Angeles.
Prof. Rizzolatti has been President of the European Brain Behavior Society and Italian Society for Neuroscience.

For several years Prof. Rizzolatti has directed the European Training Program in Brain and Behaviour Research (ETP) sponsored by the European Science Foundation and for a short time he has been a member of the "European Medical Research Council".

At present Prof. Rizzolatti is member of Scientific Committee of "Fondation Fyssen" and Associate Member of the Neuroscience Program directed by Gerald Edelman, San Diego.

He is member of "Academia Europaea", of "Accademia dei Lincei" and "Honorary Foreign Member" of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been recently elected member. “Associé étranger” of the Académie des sciences, Institut de France.

Among Prof. Rizzolatti major awards are "Golgi Prize for Physiology", "George Miller Award" of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, the "Feltrinelli Prize for Medicine" of Accademia dei Lincei, and the Herlitzka Prize for Physiology, Accademia delle Scienze di Torino.

He received Honorary Degrees from the University Claude Bernard of Lyon, from the University of St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg, the Grawemeyer Prize for Psychology from the University of Louiseville (USA) and the Prix J.-L. Signoret in Neuropsychologie from the IPSEN Fondation.

Organizzato da:
Ibp, Cnr

Referente organizzativo:
Daniela Corda
CNR - Istituto di biochimica delle proteine
Via P. Castellino, 111 80131 Napoli
d.corda@ibp.cnr.it
081/6132536

Modalità di accesso: ingresso libero