Genoa – “Lately I've had an almost pathological obsession with Arrigo Boito”. Classical music is a great passion of his, in his WhatsApp profile he has a portrait of Gustav Mahler. Among geniuses… Giulio Deangeli is a neuroscientist, researcher at Cambridge. From Padua, 28 years old, he obtained 5 degrees in six years between the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna and the University of Pisa. The scholarships obtained are countless, including the prestigious Harvard Hip, the first Italian in history. If you're thinking of a bookworm hunched over books, you're off track. Deangeli takes care of his free time, cultivates hobbies (“I love planes and everything related to aviation”), is funny and speaks in a way that is understandable to ordinary mortals. Today (Saturday 20th) he will be in Genoa involved in two events: at the Opera Don Orione, via Ayroli, at 10am, for the conference “The mechanics of the brain”; at the University Library, from 2pm he will present his book “The faculty of choosing” (Mondadori) which follows “The brilliant method”. Everything you wanted to ask about how to study without dying of boredom, achieve excellent results and orient yourself in the courses.
How do you choose a study path?
“It's difficult without knowing. Hence the idea of a book that was a big brother for a student. In these pages, in addition to explaining how universities work, there are the testimonies of a group of forty professionals, leading experts in their discipline, who tell their experience. The team members are 30 years old and have a formidable preparation who, generously, share with me the volunteering activity in “A Choice for life”, an initiative born in 2017. It is a very personal format, I wanted it to be interactive and in On the last page there is an encrypted message. The reader will be able to read it if he finds the code whose clues are scattered throughout the text.”
In “The brilliant method” she explained how you can study profitably.
“It is not enough to absorb information but also to get it out. I propose a series of methods. I will mention two: the first is that of flash cards. I wrote the title of the chapters and the compacted content on each paper. I kept the deck in my pocket. In my downtime, while traveling for example, I would repeat the cards out loud. The second method involves movement. There is evidence that exercise helps neurons replicate in the hippocampus. So I went walking in the greenery along the Lungarno Fibonacci repeating out loud. The place was popular, I made a lot of fools of myself… but I decided not to care. Among other things, air quality improves cognitive performance.”
How do you balance studying with everything else?
“I try to parallelize, I do several things at the same time, so varied and I don't get bored. It is also more enriching from a human point of view. I try to make the experience creative. Then I use the downtime to have more time for the things I like. Some might think “that loser studies all the time”, but it's the exact opposite.
What difference do you find between Italian and foreign universities?
“Italian universities are valid, without strong positive or negative peaks. The American system is top-down, there are only a few universities that attract concentrations of talent. These peaks of excellence receive more funding than all Italian universities. From a social point of view, our system offers the possibility of studying well on average everywhere.”
Do you consider yourself a brain on the run?
“No, I maintain relations with Italy even though I work and live in Cambridge. To be a good researcher you need to have a global dimension, it is normal for research to be international, to travel, to study in centers of excellence. At Cambridge I follow two laboratories led by my two mentors: Maria Grazia Spillantini, best student of Rita Levi Montalcini and Pietro Liò, one of the greatest artificial intelligence experts in the world. Two Italians”.
She deals with neurodegenerative diseases including Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, ALS.
“Yes motor and cognitive neurodegenerative. One in four of us is affected. We have seen that these diseases have similar mechanisms, a malevolent protein, which takes on an anomalous shape and spreads. We study the mechanisms of the pathology, how the disease works.”
Artificial intelligence: the debate is ongoing in Italy. There is concern. What does she say?
“We apply artificial intelligence to biomedicine. AI is capable of acquiring data and processing it. There is the regulatory problem. The people responsible for deciding must be competent on the instrument and on the problems that will arise from it. Access to similar tools cannot remain in the hands of a few, it would create series A and series B individuals”.
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