Curated by Clara Caverzasio e Viviana Kasam Joy, the project was born from the collaboration between BrainCircleLugano and BrainCircleItalia: “Emotions are an essential part of everyone's life. They condition thoughts and actions, they guide our behaviors. They influence the way we think, as well as all areas of our life: from health to school, from courts to art, from politics to sport, to the economy ". Yet a great emotional ignorance persists, a great tendency to ignore this fundamental aspect of life. Indeed, until a few years ago, emotions were considered an obstacle to rationality, an exquisitely feminine handicap, which made clear and positive thinking impossible.

“Now - continue the curators - thanks to neuroscience we know that on the contrary, emotions depend on the mind rather than oppose it, and play a role of great importance both in evolution and in training and cognitive processes. In fact, the ability to express and feel emotions not only makes our lives fuller and more colorful but is indispensable for implementing rational behaviors ".

BrainForum: Emotions

Halfway through the journey undertaken with Emotions - the Traveling BrainForum on emotions dedicated to female scientists -, with this new series of Pills we also want to give a voice to the male universe. A world in which emotions are often condemning to repression, sometimes experienced as a weakness and, in the best of cases, unheard.

Emotions: the point of view of men. You meet them

Internationally renowned scientists and experts will talk about the most innovative research on emotions. To inaugurate the series, on March 9, a heart specialist, Stefanos Demertzis, head of cardiac surgery at the Cardiocentro Ticino in Lugano (CH), associate professor at the University of Bern (CH) and the University of Italian Switzerland, Lugano (CH). And not surprisingly, since for centuries the heart has been considered the seat of the soul and emotions. However, countless subsequent discoveries in the field of neuroscience and cognitive science have demonstrated the decisive role of the central nervous system in the onset and regulation of emotions, downgrading the heart to a mere pump, albeit crucial for the survival of human beings.

Today, however, thanks to the latest discoveries, we return to pay close attention to this organ, and to the dense and unexpected dialogue it maintains with the brain. Considered until a few years ago, by the social sciences themselves, little more than an obstacle for the mind, emotions then imposed themselves as the object of study of scientific research, so much so that in 2005 - and precisely in Switzerland - the first research center in the world dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of emotions, CISA, Center Interfacultaire des Sciences Affectives - Université de Genève, where 120 researchers from the most diverse disciplines work: neuroscientists, philosophers, psychologists, researchers in social sciences and medicine, economists , ethologists, jurists, computer researchers….

  • Talking to us about what has been called the Revolution of emotions, the director of the center, David Sanders and the Head of the Research Unit of Applied Affective Sciences of the Geneva Center, Marcellus Mortillaro. With them, on March 16, we will review the state of the art of research in this vast area.
  • The indologist Giuliano Boccali, one of the leading experts in Indian culture and literature, former professor at the University of Venice Ca 'Foscari and the University of Milan, on March 23 will offer us a series of reflections on the different way in which cultures and Western and Eastern societies look at emotions and the brain, and the relationship between them. This will highlight the entirely Western prejudice that emotions are not educable (if ever we talk about repressing them or letting them manifest without restraint), in the face of millennial practices in India or Japan aimed at cultivating and refining them.
  • On March 30 it will therefore be the turn of the neuroscientist George Vallortigara, professor of Neuroscience at the Center for Mind-Brain Sciences of the University of Trento, of which he was also director, with whom we will broaden our gaze on emotions even more. Author of numerous studies and publications, among the most recent "Thoughts of the fly with a crooked head" Adelphi, 2021, and "Born Knowing", MIT Press, 2021, Vallortigara will help us understand what animals' emotions say about us, including anthropomorphism and "anthropodynamic".
  • Moshe Bar, one of the most eminent cognitive neuroscientists of his generation, director of the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv, will talk on April 6 about how and why our brains are constantly active, even when we are awake and not there. we realize that we are grinding thoughts: to this constant wandering of the mind, of which we are not fully aware, our brain dedicates up to 47% of its activity. Just a few days ago his latest volume (Mindwandering.How Your Constant Mental Drift Can Improve Your Mood and Boost Your Creativity) was released which contains years of research on this singular activity of our brain, apparently incomprehensible from an evolutionary point of view, and in in which emotions play an important role.
  • The series closes on April 13, the philosopher and economist, Matthew Motterlini, full professor of Philosophy of science at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University of Milan, and specialized in neuroeconomics, who will explain to us how we are not those rational and infallible "utility" calculators described in economic models. Indeed, as emerges from the latest contributions of neuroeconomics, our economic choices do not necessarily have to do with money, but with our emotions: they are the particular product of an incessant negotiation between passion and reason, between affections and knowledge and of play. of synapses of the corresponding brain areas.

The meetings can be followed in live streaming on Youtube and on the Facebook pages of BrainCircle Lugano and BrainCircle Italia. The recordings will then be available on the sites BrianCircle Lugano e BrainCircle Italy.