SEMINARIO 1, 16 dicembre 2025

I microRNA come regolatori della risposta allo stress:  dal cervello alla periferia
Luisa Lo Iacono

I microRNA stanno emergendo come regolatori chiave di specifiche funzioni cerebrali, con ruoli che spaziano dal controllo dei circuiti neurali alla comunicazione tra cervello e periferia. Il seminario illustrerà le principali linee di ricerca del laboratorio, con focus sul contributo dei microRNA nei meccanismi di risposta e adattamento allo stress. Presenterò in particolare i nostri studi sul microRNA-34a, evidenziandone la funzione nella identificazione e modulazione di circuiti e comportamenti stress-correlati. Sarà inoltre discusso il ruolo dei microRNA circolanti come mediatori di comunicazione sangue–cervello e il loro potenziale utilizzo come biomarcatori plasmatici nelle patologie associate allo stress.

Il laboratorio See-Life – una risorsa per l’imaging preclinico su modelli animali.
Nicola Belcari

Nel seminario si illustrerà la strumentazione a disposizione del laboratorio per l’imaging biomedico See-Life che rappresenta una neonata realtà al servizio della ricerca preclinica. Il laboratorio, compartecipato dall’Università di Pisa attraverso il CISUP e dall’Istituto di Fisiologia Clinica del CNR, è dotato di scanner multimodali ad alta risoluzione spaziale come PET/TC e SPECT/TC e sistemi di imaging ottico. Inserito nel contesto dell’IFC con la sua radiofarmacia, lo stabulario e altre risorse complementari, il laboratorio offre ai ricercatori un’intera “filiera” di ricerca, dal disegno sperimentale all’analisi delle immagini. Insieme alla strumentazione saranno anche presentati degli esempi di casi di studio .

SEMINARIO 2, 28 gennaio 2026

Mechanisms of Placebo Effects in Chronic Pain
Luana Colloca

Placebo effects are a powerful yet incompletely understood component of pain modulation, particularly in chronic pain conditions. This talk will outline a contemporary taxonomy of placebo effects and discuss their relevance to chronic orofacial pain. I will present evidence identifying psychological and sociodemographic predictors of placebo responsiveness, showing that male sex, higher neighborhood distress, catastrophizing, and psychological distress are associated with diminished placebo effects. Using neuroimaging-based brain ageing metrics, I will demonstrate that neither estimated brain age nor brain age gap predicts placebo responsiveness in adults with chronic pain. The preservation of placebo responsiveness despite chronic pain and brain ageing highlights the resilience of the brain’s “inner pharmacy” and raises important questions about its role across psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders.

Il dolore e il suo trattamento: aspetti storici, scientifici, religiosi ed etici 
Gianfranco Natale

Fra i vari sintomi, il dolore è quello che maggiormente influisce sulla qualità di vita delle persone e che sfugge a una precisa definizione e comprensione fisio-patologica. Il seminario ripercorre la storia del pensiero medico-scientifico sul dolore e sulla sua terapia, con particolare riferimento agli aspetti non solo farmacologici, ma anche filosofico-religiosi ed etici. Dai primi rimedi del mondo antico si giunge alla scoperta dell’anestesia generale che ha permesso alla chirurgia moderna il grande salto di qualità. Si esaminano le conseguenze del progresso ottenuto nell’analgesia anche nell’ottica dei problemi legati alla dipendenza farmacologica, al trattamento delle patologie tumorali, alle cure palliative e all’eutanasia.

SEMINARIO 3, 26 febbraio 2026

Grief, Intercorporeality, and Temporal Experience: A Reading of Aftersun (2022)
Alessandra Fussi

This paper conceives of grief as a temporally extended, narratively structured process that implicates practical identity and is sustained by intercorporeal, social, and material forms of affective scaffolding. Against models that construe grief as an inner mental state oriented toward the past, I argue that the grieving experience is shaped by an ongoing confrontation with absence in the present and by the collapse and gradual reconfiguration of future-oriented possibilities. In this way, grief discloses the value of what is lost while remaining essentially attuned to transience. Drawing on phenomenological accounts of intercorporeality, on Freud’s reflections on transience and on Peter Goldie’s notion of the fusion of horizons, I offer an analysis of Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun (2022). The film articulates grief as an open-ended process in which intercorporeal memory and material culture sustain continuing bonds, and in which past experience is narratively reconfigured without reducing contingency to retrospective necessity.

L’incontro con la malattia, la sofferenza, la morte in Occidente e in Oriente
Bruno Neri

Il seminario analizza l’incontro con la malattia, la sofferenza e la morte mettendo in dialogo l’approccio occidentale contemporaneo e la tradizione buddhista tibetana. In Occidente, la morte appare come l’ultimo tabù di una cultura dominata dal paradigma materialista, che tende a ridurre la coscienza a epifenomeno neurobiologico e a rimuovere l’angoscia esistenziale anziché elaborarla. Vengono esaminati i livelli filosofico, religioso, psicologico e medico-neuroscientifico, evidenziando i limiti del riduzionismo quando applicato indiscriminatamente all’esperienza soggettiva. Sul versante orientale, il Buddismo tibetano propone una concezione processuale della morte come trasformazione della coscienza, descritta nel Bardo Tödol e nelle pratiche di Mahamudra e Chiara Luce. La meditazione diventa addestramento al morire e strumento per disaccoppiare dolore e sofferenza.L’obiettivo non è contrapporre modelli, ma aprire uno spazio interdisciplinare in cui neuroscienze, filosofia e pratiche contemplative possano contribuire a una comprensione più integrata dell’esperienza umana della finitudine.

SEMINARIO 4, 24 marzo 2026

Consciousness in Tibetan Buddhism
Geshe Jamyang Tashi

In Tibetan Buddhism, consciousness is understood as a continuum articulated in different levels of subtlety. The tradition distinguishes a gross level of mind, closely related to sensory perception and ordinary cognitive activity; a subtle level, which emerges as sensory and discursive functions gradually subside; and a very subtle or primordial level of mind, known as the Clear Light, regarded as the deepest and most fundamental dimension of consciousness. Through contemplative and meditative practices developed within the Tibetan monastic tradition, practitioners can progressively explore these different levels of mind, learning to recognize the nature of awareness beyond ordinary mental activity. This perspective also provides a key to understanding the process of death: according to Tibetan Buddhism, at the moment of dying consciousness gradually withdraws from the gross levels and reveals the most subtle dimension of mind, the Clear Light, which represents the deepest level of consciousness.

SEMINARIO 5, 29 aprile 2026

Identification of coding-structures for cognition and behavior
Eleonora Russo

Neuronal dynamics emerge from a complex interplay of biological processes operating across diverse temporal scales. A significant challenge in neuroscience is to find structure within such variability and discern which components of this dynamics encode information and drive behavior. In this endeavor, unsupervised data mining presents a powerful opportunity. In this talk, I will discuss different unsupervised approaches for analyzing neuronal time series to uncover and model hidden regularities in experimental data. I will exemplify this approach with results from hippocampal, midbrain, and prefrontal regions.

Symmetries and Synchronization in Neuronal Systems
Tommaso Gili

Complex biological networks display a sophisticated interplay between the structural organization of their components’ interactions and the overall functionality of the system. This is especially evident in neuroscience, where the multiscale organisation of neurons generates a wide range of hierarchical functions, posing a longstanding challenge in systems neuroscience: understanding how ‘structure’ relates to ‘function’. The link between functional connectivity patterns in neuronal systems and the underlying structural connectivity architecture that governs their communication dynamics remains poorly understood, leaving the structure-function relationship still constrained by a one-to-many correspondence. In this work, we demonstrate that a novel class of non-global symmetries — known as fibration symmetries — which capture local dynamical regularities such as cluster synchronization, can be leveraged to infer distinct subsets of structural connections from the broader connectome, each associated with specific patterns of local dynamical activity.

SEMINARIO 6, 28 maggio 2026

Interoception: How the body shapes emotion and cognition
Žan Zelič

Interoception refers to the sensing, integration, and interpretation of signals originating from within the body. This seminar introduces the main pathways through which bodily signals reach the brain and the (sub)cortical structures involved in their processing, with particular emphasis on the insula. It then presents interoception as a multidimensional construct comprising accuracy, sensibility, and awareness, and reviews the main methods used to measure these dimensions, including behavioral tasks, self-report questionnaires, metacognitive measures, and physiological indices such as heartbeat-evoked potentials. The seminar further examines the role of interoception in emotion and cognition, focusing on how bodily signals shape emotional intensity and emotion regulation, as well as attention, memory, and decision-making. It also considers altered interoception as a potential transdiagnostic risk factor for psychopathology and introduces possible approaches to improving interoceptive functioning. In the final section, the seminar focuses on the relationship between interoception and hypnotizability, showing how individual differences in responsiveness to suggestions may be associated with differences in interoception and related phenomena, including emotion regulation, time perception, proneness to dissociative symptoms, and alterations in sense of agency and body ownership. The seminar concludes by considering how hypnotizability could inform the development of new forms of interoceptive training.

Prosocial Behaviour, Social Preferences, and Cognitive Modes: Insights from Experimental Economics
Pietro Guarnieri

Experimental economics has developed a wide range of paradigmatic experiments to investigate how individuals make decisions in social contexts. These experiments have played a central role in identifying and studying what economists call “social preferences”: motivations related to altruism, fairness, inequality aversion, cooperation, and other forms of prosocial behaviour. The talk will begin with a brief introduction to behavioural and experimental economic methods and to the concept of social preferences. This will provide the background for discussing a broader research question concerning the relationship between prosocial behaviour, prosocial motives, and different cognitive modes. In particular, the seminar will review some lines of research that interpret cooperation and prosociality through the lens of dual-process theories of cognition, distinguishing between intuitive and deliberative processes. The final part of the talk will focus on some conceptual and empirical limitations of this approach, opening the discussion to alternative perspectives and interdisciplinary challenges.

SEMINARIO 7, 24 giugno 2026

Spontaneous eyeblinking and blink-related EEG oscillations: assessing primary consciousness at rest and during goal-directed behaviour
Luca Bonfiglio

This talk explores spontaneous blinking during rest and goal-directed behavior, showing it could be an electrophysiological indicator of basal consciousness. Based on studies in patients with disorders of consciousness, the focus centers on blink-related EEG oscillations (BROs) generated within the precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex. This system supports automatic environmental monitoring, and its spectral modulation varies with awareness levels. Consequently, these neural correlates could serve as a possible clinical biomarker to differentiate the vegetative state from the minimally conscious state.

Influenze trigeminali sulla performance cognitiva e i processi neurodegenerativi
Diego Manzoni

Ricerche recenti indicano che le informazioni trigeminali legate all’attività masticatoria possono influenzare acutamente le prestazioni cognitive, che aumentano con il carico masticatorio. La mancanza o la riduzione di questi segnali sensorimotori riduce le prestazioni cognitive e, in condizioni croniche, può promuovere fenomeni neurodegenerativi. È possibile che sia le azioni acute che quelle croniche dipendano dall’influenza che le informazioni trigeminali esercitano sul sistema reticolare attivatore ascendente e, in particolare, sulla sua componente noradrenergica che ha origine dal Locus Coeruleus.