How is the brain organized from the hierarchical point of view and how complex is its functioning? What is the link between the mind and the brain and where do our thoughts come from? Modern neurosciences propose a multi-line approach in order to answer these questions. This approach involves the molecular aspects, but also the psychological, psychiatric and pharmacological ones.
The Summer School “Brain and Gut Neuroscience: From Molecules to Mood”, organized by the Research Institute for Quantitative and Quantum Dynamics of Living Organisms – Center for Medicine, Mathematics & Philosophy Studies together with Bromatech, Politecnico di Torino, Società Italiana di Biologia Sperimentale, wants to present a complete vision of the human brain from both the hierarchical and the functional point of view.
The hypotheses of the cognitive neuroscience use theoretic suppositions of the physics of the XIX century. Specifically, the neural net models of the “emerging conscious experience” are based on analogies with the relationships between crystal molecules, fluids and gases and use chemical hypotheses about the appearance of thoughts, states of mind and perceptions starting from the chemical modulation of the synaptic interaction in neurons.
However, the science of the XX and XXI centuries offers probabilistic perspectives from where to study the link between the mind and the brain. The quantum mechanics and the quantum field theory gave the physicists more “degrees of freedom”. Relatively new derivations of the quantum physics are the quantum information theory, the quantum cryptography and the quantum computing that, together with the so-called quantum biology, pave the way for new cognitive paradigm and a new psychological literature.
The study of these theories can offer new perspectives for the research on the genesis and the nature of mental illnesses.
The course will be given at the Politecnico, from 26th to 31st August and 50 doctors from all over Italy and about 15 students of technical and physical subjects will come to Turin. They will be discussing this topic with 15 international speakers. Among them there will be Ted Dinan (Ireland), Gustav Bernroider (Austria), Paavo Pylkkanen (Finland), Mark Rasenick (Chicago, USA) and Italian lecturers Massimo Cocchi , Francesco Cappello, Giuseppe Vitiello and Alessandro Vercelli.
