Vittorio Gallese - Biography#

Since the discovery of mirror neurons (di Pellegrino et al., 1992; Gallese et al., 1996; Rizzolatti et al. 1996), Vittorio Gallese played a major role in proposing the possible far-reaching consequences of this neural mechanism, formulating the theory of embodied simulation (Gallese, 2005, 2014). He identified the wide implications of this discovery for a range of disciplines such as cognitive, social, and developmental psychology, psychiatry, psycholinguistics, philosophy of mind, educational sciences, and aesthetics. He proposed that sensorimotor processes and their interplay with interoception are the embodied bases of intersubjectivity and social cognition, establishing new experimental approaches to several aspects defining human cognition. To this purpose, he established extensive collaborations with cognitive linguists, psychiatrists, philosophers, art and film scholars, leading to a series of empirical investigations in all these different fields. Another strength of his approach consists in adopting a comparative perspective, the only capable to connect distinctive traits of human cognition to their likely phylogenetic precursors. Indeed, he is one of the very few contemporary cognitive neuroscientists who can investigate the relationship between brain, behavior and cognition, moving from the recording of neurons in non-human primates to the study of the human brain-body by means of physiological and imaging techniques. During the last decade, his research activity has been mainly devoted, on the one hand, to the investigation of the neural and physiological mechanisms at the basis of a core dimension of the Self –the bodily self- and its psychopathological aspects in psychosis, autism and PTSD. His research, on the other, has shed new light on the neural and physiological mechanisms underlying the aesthetic experience of art, film and literature, proposing a radically new approach to aesthetics. This approach is motivated by 4 starting assumptions: 1) All meaningful experience is aesthetic experience; 2) Aesthetic experience must be framed within the broader notions of social cognition and intersubjectivity, as works of art and cultural artifacts are mediators of the relationship between the subjectivities of artists/creators and beholders; 3) Vision is a process far more complex than the mere activation of the ‘visual brain’, because seeing the world means looking at the world to understand it; 4) Our visual experience of the world is the outcome of multimodal integration processes, in which the motor system is one of the key players. Embodied simulation, thus becomes a unifying functional mechanism accounting for humans’ relation to both physical reality and its various forms of representation. This body of work led in the last ten years to the publication of 145 articles in international peer-reviewed scientific journals, 31 book chapters and 2 books.