 Alessandro Treves 【作者简介】 Alessandro Treves was born in 1960 and has grown up in Florence. After a brief period at Yale College, he studied theoretical physics in Florence, Rome and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he was attracted to mathematical models of neural networks, as a tool to contribute to understand the brain. He received his PhD in 1989, under the supervision of the late Daniel Amit, one of the pioneers in the application of tools and concepts from statistical physics to the study of memory. He then spent 3 postdoctoral years in Oxford, serving as a theoretician in the monkey neurophysiology laboratory of Edmund Rolls, where he was introduced to many different approache to neuroscience. He has been at SISSA, the International School for Advanced Studies of Trieste, Italy, since 1992; he leads the limbo research group, and currently serves as coordinator of the Area of Neuroscience. Since 2003 he has also been affiliated with the rodent neurophysiology research center of Edvard and May-Britt Moser (2014 Nobel Prize winners) in Trondheim, Norway. In 2011-2013 he has served as Science Advisor to the Italian Embassy in Tel Aviv and, upon returning to SISSA, as Director of the Master in Complex Actions, an executive course aimed at stimulating hi-tech entrepreneurship. In 2010 he has convened the first, and so far last, Ararat Memory Meeting in Yerevan, Armenia. Alessandro’s research interests focus on understanding the logic of the organization of different brain circuits, including the hippocampus and the cerebral cortex and other structures, and their evolution, in particular at the transition from reptiles to mammals. More recently, he has also been interested in the phase transition that appears to have occurred with the emergence of modern humans with their advanced cognitive capabilities, in particular the language faculty. He is convinced that studying linguistic diversity, as expressed in cross- and even within-language variability, in relation with the universal cortical mechanisms that support language, is key to understand human cognition in general, and our capacity to make a good use of it. (责任编辑：admin) |