Who is Giulio Tononi and what does he do?
Giulio Tononi ( Italian: [ˈdʒuːljo toˈnoːni]) is a neuroscientist and psychiatrist who holds the David P. White Chair in Sleep Medicine, as well as a Distinguished Chair in Consciousness Science, at the University of Wisconsin .
When did Giovanni Tononi join the Neuroscience Institute?
From 1990 to 2000, he was a member of The Neurosciences Institute, first in New York and then in San Diego.
What did dr.tononi contribute to the study of sleep?
Dr. Tononi’s main contribution in the study of sleep has been the development of a comprehensive hypothesis about the function of sleep, the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis. According to the hypothesis, sleep serves to renormalize synaptic strength, counterbalancing a net increase of synaptic strength due to plasticity during wakefulness.
What does Tononi have to do with schizophrenia?
Tononi’s laboratory has also demonstrated that patients with schizophrenia show a characteristic reduction of sleep spindles—a hallmark of the sleep EEG —pointing to an impairment of a specific region of the thalamus that could account for many of the symptoms.
What did dr.tononi contribute to the study of consciousness?
Dr. Tononi’s main contribution in the study of consciousness has been the development of the integrated information theory. This is a comprehensive theory of what consciousness is, what determines its quantity and quality, and how it emerges from causal structures such as neural networks.
What is the fundamental nature of consciousness by Giulio Tononi?
This chapter from PHI: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul, by Giulio Tononi (Pantheon, 2012) describes Tononi’s theory of consciousness as a measure of information. The brain, Tononi postulates, consists of billions of neurons: think of them as if they were transistorlike bits that, when tallied, sum to equal more than their parts.