Project title
Towards an embodied theory of brain function
Research question
The brain is first and foremost an organ in the body, whose first priority is to keep itself and the rest of the body alive. How to understand cognition in this perspective?
Project description
Most modern neuroscience start from the premise that the brain represents information about the external world, and performs computations on these representations as a computer would do. The conceptual pillars of this vision are statistical inference, neural representations, predictive coding, and action optimization.
This paradigm has been undeniably successful in generating descriptive knowledge, also helped by new experimental techniques, but it is becoming clear to many that it is not getting us closer to a proper theory of the brain.
The “brain as a computer” hypothesis misses, however, the idea that the body should be considered as a part of all feedback loops by which the brain operates. Interactions with the outside world are always mediated by the body. Thus, I hypothesize, all activity in the brain, from emotion and interoception to cognition, arise, directly or indirectly, from repurposing and extending patterns that relate to brain-body interactions.
My NIAS project will enable me to start contributing to a theory of the brain rooted in brain-body interactions, based on my knowledge of experimental, theoretical neuroscience and neurotechnology.
Selected publications
- Pedrosa R, Nazari M, Mohajerani MH, Knöpfel T, Stella F, Battaglia FP Hippocampal gamma and sharp wave/ripples mediate bidirectional interactions with cortical networks during sleep (2022) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119 (44), e2204959119
- Kaefer K, Stella F, McNaughton BL, Battaglia FP Replay, the default mode network and the cascaded memory systems model (2022) Nature Reviews Neuroscience 23 (10), 628-640
- Peyrache A, Benchenane K, Khamassi M, Wiener SI, Battaglia FP Replay of rule-learning related neural patterns in the prefrontal cortex during sleep. (2009) Nature neuroscience 12 (7) 919-926