PERSON
Giulio Tononi
Italian-American neuroscientist (b. 1960) who developed Integrated Information Theory — the most ambitious attempt to transform consciousness from a philosophical mystery into a measurable quantity.
Giulio Tononi is an Italian-American neuroscientist and psychiatrist (b. 1960, Trento) who holds the David P. White Chair in Sleep Medicine at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he directs the Wisconsin Institute for Sleep and Consciousness. His development of Integrated Information Theory represents one of the most ambitious theoretical programs in contemporary neuroscience — an attempt to solve the hard problem of consciousness by mathematical inversion, beginning with the phenomenology of experience and deriving the physical structure any conscious system must possess. With Marcello Massimini, he developed the Perturbational Complexity Index, a clinical tool that has changed how medicine diagnoses disorders of consciousness.
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Tononi earned his medical degree and completed psychiatric specialty training at the University of Pisa before moving to the United States for postdoctoral work with Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman at the Neuroscience Institute in San Diego. The collaboration with Edelman was formative: Edelman's work on reentrant dynamics and neural Darwinism provided the biological substrate from which