I am a theorist of the mind. I earned my university degree in Foreign Languages and Literatures at IULM, Milan, in 1989, under the supervision of Silvio Ceccato. I collaborated with the Laboratory for the Culture of the Artificial, directed by Massimo Negrotti at the University of Urbino, and served as a contract professor at the Faculty of Sociology of the same university. In 2002, I founded the research network www.mind-consciousness-language.com. In 2025, I launched Aletheia. A Journal of Literary and Linguistic Studies. Currently, I collaborate with the Open Research Unit for Business Leaders, directed by Luca Magni at LUISS Business School. I serve as Review Editor of Frontiers in Consciousness Research, as an editorial board member of the International Journal of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and as a member of the IEEE Task Force on Towards Human-like Intelligence.
Dire senza dire. Non dire dicendo (I)
Emotion, Consciousness, and Attention
Emotions are a specific type of conscious experience that helps preserve the integrity of our self by guiding us toward actions that restore our state of equilibrium in response to unexpected or unusual events. Emotions accomplish this function by informing us that our self has entered a state of disequilibrium, indicating the nature of this disequilibrium (positive vs. negative, or pleasure vs. displeasure) and its intensity (strong or weak), signaling—through appraisal processes or some mechanisms of direct elicitation—that this disequilibrium has been caused by an object and typically identifying which object it is, and, finally, guiding us—by eliciting specific physiological responses and action tendencies—toward actions aimed at restoring the original equilibrium or establishing a new equilibrium acceptable for our self.