School of Brain Cells & Circuits “Camillo Golgi”: The Neural Bases of Action – from cellular microcircuits to large-scale networks and modelling

This abstracts book is reproducing the abstracts submitted to the 2018 course of the “School of Brain Cells and Circuits “Camillo Golgi””. The course focused on the multiscale investigation and modeling of the motor system. Motor control is a fundamental function that characterizes the animal kingdom and has driven brain evolution toward cognition. Therefore, understanding motor control is a fundamental step for understanding how the whole brain is organized and operates. The fundamental brain structures of vertebrates that are involved were covered in turn, including the cerebral cortex, basal ganglia, cerebellum, brain stem and spinal cord. Special attention was given to pathologies emerging from dysfunctions of the motor system. Different aspects of motor control were addressed at the level of cellular physiology, computational modeling and integrated brain signals using electrophysiological techniques and magnetic resonance imaging. Mathematical modeling was emphasized for its special effectiveness in tackling motor control problems and for explaining the function of the system across multiple complexity scales. By bringing together these communities and offering advanced teaching sessions and discussion panels on key topics, the course fostered future research in the field and made a strong methodological case on how to combine experimental and modeling approaches in order to explain how the brain works.

The abstracts here within derive from the 2018 Course of the School of Brain Cells and Circuits that has been held in the wonderful context of Erice by the “Ettore Majorana Foundation and Centre for Scientific Culture”.