I have always been fascinated by how mathematical formalism can be used to simply understand and describe very complex phenomena. For this reason, after my master’s degree in mathematics, I decided to exploit my formation to study the most complex structure in the world: the brain.
At the bases of my research activity there are two question: how do neurons encode information and generate behaviour? Can be exploit this knowledge to develop biomedical applications?
Recently I tried to answer these locally in V6A, an area of posterior parietal cortex. This is a visuomotor area modulated by a plethora of different factors: visual and somatic stimuli, arm movement, gaze position ecc.
Testing simultaneously the contribution of several parameters, I found that this area is characterized by a ‘’mixed selectivity’’ i.e. , just a minority of cells is strongly modulated by a specific factor, while most cells code for combinations of different features. From an applicational point of view, I showed the possibility to extract in an unsupervised way, different neural states corresponding to different phases during an arm movement and thus the possibility to use this information to drive a discrete Brain Machine Interface.