Luciano Fadiga (born 8 August 1961) is a neurophysiologist at the Human Physiology Section of the

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 ...

and a Senior Researcher at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia of

Genoa Genoa ( ; ; ) is a city in and the capital of the Italian region of Liguria, and the sixth-largest city in Italy. As of 2025, 563,947 people live within the city's administrative limits. While its metropolitan city has 818,651 inhabitan ...

Italy Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe, Western Europe. It consists of Italian Peninsula, a peninsula that extends into the Mediterranean Sea, with the Alps on its northern land b ...

. Born in 1961. M.D.,

University of Bologna The University of Bologna (, abbreviated Unibo) is a Public university, public research university in Bologna, Italy. Teaching began around 1088, with the university becoming organised as guilds of students () by the late 12th century. It is the ...

, Ph.D. in

Neuroscience Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions, and its disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, ...

, University of Parma. Senior Researcher at the University of Parma since 1992. He is actually Professor of Human Physiology at the University of Ferrara and Senior Researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). He is the director of the IIT Center for Traslational Neurophysiology. He has a long experience in

electrophysiology Electrophysiology (from ee the Electron#Etymology, etymology of "electron" ; and ) is the branch of physiology that studies the electrical properties of biological cell (biology), cells and tissues. It involves measurements of voltage change ...

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: #The description of the functional properties of the monkey ventral premotor cortex. During this time Fadiga, together with his Parma colleagues, discovered mirror neurons, a class of

neuron A neuron (American English), neurone (British English), or nerve cell, is an membrane potential#Cell excitability, excitable cell (biology), cell that fires electric signals called action potentials across a neural network (biology), neural net ...

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 () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous syste ...

and action and may contribute to others’ action understanding (''Experimental Brain Research'', 1992; ''Brain'', 1996; ''Cognitive Brain Research'', 1996). #The first demonstration that a mirror system exists also in humans. He achieved this result by applying

transcranial magnetic stimulation Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a noninvasive neurostimulation technique in which a changing magnetic field is used to induce an electric current in a targeted area of the brain through electromagnetic induction. A device called a st ...

(TMS) on the hand

motor cortex The motor cortex is the region of the cerebral cortex involved in the planning, motor control, control, and execution of voluntary movements. The motor cortex is an area of the frontal lobe located in the posterior precentral gyrus immediately ...

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). #The study of peripersonal space representation in monkey

premotor cortex The premotor cortex is an area of the motor cortex lying within the frontal lobe of the brain just anterior to the primary motor cortex. It occupies part of Brodmann's area 6. It has been studied mainly in primates, including monkeys and human ...

(''Science'', 1997). #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). #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). #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). Other fields of his research concern attention and its neural mechanisms in normal subjects and patients. He has been involved in RobotCub, CONTACT, Siempre and Poeticon EU projects, he is currently working in EnTimeMent and Cobra EU Projects. He is interacting with roboticists 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. Fadiga is reviewer of many international neuroscience journals, he was principal investigator in CNR 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 200 peer-reviewed publications in international journals. His work has received about 50,000 citations (H-Index, 77. Source: Google Scholar). Luciano Fadiga has been member and Chair of the SH4 Panel (Starting and Consolidator Grants) of the European Research Council (ERC).

References

Europe's Information Society, IST Event 2006

External links

* ttp://www.iit.it/it/people/luciano-fadiga.html IIT Website {{DEFAULTSORT:Fadiga, Luciano 1961 births University of Bologna alumni University of Parma alumni Italian physiologists Living people Italian neuroscientists Neurophysiologists