Libri di Vittorio Gallese

What is the human self becoming in the age of daily interaction with digital devices? An unprecedent exploration of the relationship between body, mind and technology in the digital world. In a world where artificial intelligence generates faces, voices, and presences capable of simulating empathy, the digital self explores an anthropological mutation currently underway. Starting from the neuroscience of embodiment and the now classic theory of embodied simulation, Vittorio Gallese constructs a new paradigm for thinking about contemporary subjectivity. From mirror neurons to algorithmic subjectivity, this book traces an original and multidisciplinary itinerary that crosses neuroscience, philosophy, aesthetics, and media theory to rethink the self as an embodied, relational, and technologically modulated reality. The theoretical culmination of the volume is the proposal of a radical aesthetics: a politics of feeling that restores intensity, opacity, and unpredictability to relationships in a world dominated by transparent interfaces and predictive algorithms. At a time when otherness risks becoming a function, and retreating into solitude a project, there is an urgent need to return to thinking about the body, not as nostalgia, but as a generative condition of every possible future. A necessary essay for understanding the metamorphosis of the self in the age of code.

The discovery of mirror neurons was a huge revolution not only for the neurological and biological studies, but also for humanities. Anthropological and sociological research is highlighting the paradox of considering ourselves as expressions of the relationships and contexts in which we live.Science, in fact, shows us that intersubjectivity sets its roots in the prenatal stage, throughout the relationship between the fetus and the mother, within wich multisensory connections are developed and are destinated to leave a trace in postnatal memory.Two distinguished scholars of our time draw attention to the importance of recognizing ourselves as sharers, rather than individuals, in order to understand what it means to be human nowadays through an interdisciplinary essay that starts with a scientific discovery and comes to embrace all that underlies the world and the life of our species.

Digital and new technologies are really the reasons for our anxiety, stress and loneliness? Are all adolescences’ problems really connected to social media and smartphones? During the history of humankind, the development of new widespread technologies has always been seen as something threatening. That was the case of photography, cinema, TV and then the internet. Every techno-scientific revolution saw the raising of many heralds of doom who said that machines would have brought disaster on man and society. Today the situation is not different, especially against what is considered to be the most dangerous digital creation of these last decades: the smartphone. In fact, it is a common thought that what it is probably the most feared and the most used technology is also cause for anxiety, inattention and social isolation. In face of these beliefs, can permissions to a limited use or prohibitions be the solution? This is the authors’ starting point: unmasking false ideologies and pointless ways, they explain what neuroscience research can tell us about this matter and what are and will be the real challenges of a digital society.