IMT School recently signed an agreement with the UVA School of Data Science (UVA SDS), a pioneering institution at the University of Virginia dedicated to advancing the field of data science through cutting-edge research, interdisciplinary collaboration, and innovative education programs. UVA SDS and IMT School are working on a collaborative research effort aimed at advancing the frontiers of data science. Leveraging the complementary strengths of both institutions, this partnership seeks to foster interdisciplinary exchange, facilitate faculty and graduate student visits, and cultivate joint research initiatives across all disciplines.

On May 23 in the Cappella Guinigi, an in-person, conjoint workshop will allow researchers and scientists of both Institutions to meet and start sharing their research experiences.

Believing is a central brain function of humans. It interacts with other brain functions such as learning and memory and has a strong influence on our actions. The processes of believing are encompassed by the umbrella term credition (derived from Latin credere = to believe). They include perception of external information, valuation in terms of effort and reward, predictive coding of action, and reinforcement learning that take place predominantly outside conscious awareness. Believing results in mindsets and attitudes that stabilize people’s worldviews but may convert into limitations of how to act. On the neural level the formation of beliefs is mediated by higher order associative brain regions. Notably, people may become aware of their beliefs to some extent. This is the prerequisite for being able to phrase what one believes and to reason about it. Subsequently it is possible to communicate the contents of what one believes to other people. This pertains also to the discourse within and about religions. In conclusion, people’s worldviews are brought about by processes of believing that as such are not religious, but play an important role in religions and for long have been neglected by the sciences.

Emotions are commonly associated with bodily sensations, even in the way we talk about emotions (e.g., boiling with anger when overwhelmed with rage or feeling butterflies in the stomach when terribly in love). Recent constructionist approaches have suggested that emotions emerge because of “mixing” bodily states with sensory information and finally their conceptualisation through language. In line with this perspective, in this talk I will present a series of studies that explore body-emotion relationship, in particular exploring: a) whether and to what extent brain regions somatotopically organised are actively involved in the feeling of subjective emotion and experiences (Study 1) using fMRI; b) the causal role of somatosensory areas in perceiving and generating subjective emotions using tACS (Study 2); c) the role of vision as well as high-level cognition, such as language, in the subjective experience of emotions (Study 3), using a sensory deprivation approach (i.e., assessing blind individuals) and, finally, d) we observed whether the body facilitates the ability to recognise emotions in clinical populations that show emotion recognition impairments. To do this, we studied Benign Rolandic Epilepsy (BRE) as a model to explore a possible benefit of the body in emotion recognition when the impairment is located at the level of the Central Nervous System (SNC) level (i.e., top-down level). Overall, the results of the studies presented converge on the conclusion that the body plays a crucial role in perceiving and generating emotions, thus pointing to a strong embodied and constructionist perspective of emotional processing.