Seminars

Various clinical cases have provided evidence linking cardiovascular, neurological, and psychiatric disorders to changes in the brain-heart interaction. Our recent experimental evidence on patients with disorders of consciousness revealed that observing brain-heart interactions helps to detect residual consciousness, even in patients with absence of behavioral signs of consciousness. Those findings support hypotheses suggesting that visceral activity is involved in the neurobiology of consciousness and sum to the existing evidence in healthy participants in which the neural responses to heartbeats reveal perceptual and self-consciousness. Furthermore, the presence of non-linear, complex, and bidirectional communication between brain and heartbeat dynamics can provide further insights into the physiological state of the patient following severe brain injury. These developments on methodologies to analyze brain-heart interactions open new avenues for understanding neural functioning at a large-scale level, uncovering that peripheral bodily activity can influence brain homeostatic processes, cognition, and behavior.

Prof. Marcello Massimini will give a talk addressed to the Humanitas University Undergraduate Neurological Society students and Humanitas Neuro Center members about consciousness and his groundbreaking studies on this topic. Prof. Maurizio Cecconi and Dr. Villa will then give their clinical point of view as neurointensivists on the pathologic states of consciousness.