Luciano Fadiga is a neurophysiologist at the Human Physiology department of the University of Ferrara

University of Ferrara

The University of Ferrara is the main university of the city of Ferrara in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy. In the years prior to the First World War the University of Ferrara, with more than 500 students, was the best attended of the free universities in Italy...

, Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

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Born in 1961. M.D., University of Bologna

University of Bologna

The Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna is the oldest continually operating university in the world, the word 'universitas' being first used by this institution at its foundation. The true date of its founding is uncertain, but believed by most accounts to have been 1088...

, Ph.D. in Neuroscience

Neuroscience

Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system. Traditionally, neuroscience has been seen as a branch of biology. However, it is currently an interdisciplinary science that collaborates with other fields such as chemistry, computer science, engineering, linguistics, mathematics,...

, University of Parma

University of Parma

The University of Parma is one of the oldest universities in the world, founded in the 11th century. It is organised in twelve faculties. The University of Parma has currently about 30,000 students.-History:...

. Senior Researcher at the University of Parma since 1992. He is actually Professor of Human Physiology at the University of Ferrara and Senior Scientist at the Italian Institute of Technology

Italian Institute of Technology

The Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia or Italian Institute of Technology is a foundation established jointly by the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research and the Ministry of Economy and Finance to promote excellence in basic and applied research and to contribute to the economic...

. He has a long experience in electrophysiology

Electrophysiology

Electrophysiology is the study of the electrical properties of biological cells and tissues. It involves measurements of voltage change or electric current on a wide variety of scales from single ion channel proteins to whole organs like the heart...

 and neurophysiology in monkeys (single-neuron recordings) and humans (transcranial magnetic stimulation, study of spinal excitability, brain imaging, recording of single neurons in awake neurosurgery patients).

Among his contributions:

1. The description of the functional properties of the monkey ventral premotor cortex. During this time Fadiga, together with his Parma colleagues, discovered mirror neuron
   Mirror neuron
   A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behaviour of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. Such neurons have been directly observed in primate and other...
   
   s, a class of neuron
   Neuron
   A neuron is an electrically excitable cell that processes and transmits information by electrical and chemical signaling. Chemical signaling occurs via synapses, specialized connections with other cells. Neurons connect to each other to form networks. Neurons are the core components of the nervous...
   
   s that respond both when the monkey performs actions and when it observes similar actions made by other individuals. Fadiga has suggested that these neurons unify perception
   Perception
   Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...
   
    and action and may contribute to others’ action understanding (Experimental Brian Research, 1992; Brain, 1996; Cognitive Brain Research, 1996).
2. The first demonstration that a mirror system exists also in humans. He achieved this result by applying transcranial magnetic stimulation
   Transcranial magnetic stimulation
   Transcranial magnetic stimulation is a noninvasive method to cause depolarization or hyperpolarization in the neurons of the brain...
   
    (TMS) on the hand motor cortex
   Motor cortex
   Motor cortex is a term that describes regions of the cerebral cortex involved in the planning, control, and execution of voluntary motor functions.-Anatomy of the motor cortex :The motor cortex can be divided into four main parts:...
   
    of human subjects while they were observing others' actions. He demonstrated that the amplitude of observer’s hand muscle potentials, as evoked by TMS, was specifically and significantly modulated by the observed actions (Journal of Neurophysiology 1995).
3. The study of peripersonal space representation in monkey premotor cortex
   Premotor cortex
   The premotor cortex is an area of motor cortex lying within the frontal lobe of the brain. It extends 3 mm anterior to the primary motor cortex, near the Sylvian fissure, before narrowing to approximately 1 mm near the medial longitudinal fissure, which serves as the posterior border for...
   
    (Science, 1997).
4. The demonstration that a similar motor resonance is activated during speech listening and involves tongue-related motor centers (European Journal of Neuroscience, 2002). He recently further demonstrates that this motor activation evoked by speech listening is functional to speech perception. This result shows for the first time a causal relationship between action representation and perception (The motor somatotopy of speech perception, Current Biology, 2009).
5. The first demonstration that, in humans, the frontal area for speech production (Broca’s area) is almost constantly activated by action observation (by several brain imaging experiments carried out in collaboration with San Raffaele Hospital of Milan, USC and UCLA of Los Angeles, HUT of Helsinki, Juelich Brain Imaging Center, Royal Holloway University of London) (Experimental Brain Research 1996).
6. The very recent demonstration that Broca’s area activation reflects a primary role played by this area in pragmatically understanding actions of others (Brain, 2009).

Fadiga is currently leading a group of researchers at the University of Ferrara. He is coordinating a project on neuro-rehabilitation of stroke patients by action observation. He is leading a group of researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology to investigate the possibility to establish hardware communication between the human brain and some artificial device (brain-machine interfaces). He is now recording single neurons in awake neurosurgery patients to study the neurophysiology of the human brain in brain cancer-affected patients in collaboration with Miran Skrap. Other fields of his research concern attention and its neural mechanisms in normal subjects and patients. Currently involved in RobotCub, CONTACT, and Poeticon EU projects, he is interacting with roboticians in order to perform experiments on artefacts that would never be possible in living subjects. Within EU-IST, he is a strong supporter of the emerging cultural domain which is neurorobotics

Neurorobotics

Neurorobotics, a combined study of neuroscience, robotics, and artificial intelligence, is the science and technology of embodied autonomous neural systems. Neural systems include brain-inspired algorithms , computational models of biological neural networks Neurorobotics, a combined study of...

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Fadiga is reviewer of many international neuroscience journals, he was principal investigator in CNR

Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche

The Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche or National Research Council, is an Italian public organization set up to support scientific and technological research. Its headquarters are in Rome.-History:The institution was founded in 1923...

projects on reaching-grasping, he directs several European Projects on action and speech recognition and control, he was co-investigator in Human Frontier Science Program and McDonnel-Pew funded projects, he has published more than 50 peer-reviewed publications in international journals. His work has received more than 10,000 citations (H-Index, 31)

External links

• Neurolab Website