Dr Andrea Luppi

A Luppi

Research interestsGeneral anaesthesia is one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of medicine, enabling millions of life-saving surgeries each year worldwide. However, we still do not know how anaesthetics influence the delicate functioning of the brain to suppress consciousness. Dr Luppi's doctoral work used anaesthesia as a lens to interrogate brain function to understand how brain architecture orchestrates information processing.

After transitioning from Philosophy to Neuroscience, his PhD combined network science and information theory. He discovered that the interactions between different brain regions are synergistic, carrying more information than the sum of their individual contributions. This neural synergy is diminished when consciousness is lost, whether due to anaesthesia or brain injury. It is also especially prominent in evolutionarily recent regions of the human brain, and greater in humans than in non-human primates.

These discoveries converge on a role of synergy in supporting human cognition, raising the intriguing prospect of using synergy as a guiding principle to develop more human-like artificial intelligence. This is the research that Dr Luppi will conduct during his time as a Fellow of St John’s. He will investigate the role of synergy in supporting cognitive function and dysfunction, both in the human brain and in artificial neural networks.