Liminar Investigations of Memory and Brain Organization

Postdoc available:    Memory Glass in Language Evolution

Applications are invited - with deadline Dec 11, 2023 - for a postdoc in limbo. The project is based on our research and on extensive data on language parameters collected by Longobardi and collaborators, which suggest that language diversity may reflect the disordered freezing dynamics that in a spin glass lead to a multiplicity of ground states. In a simplified mode, vectors of binary syntactic parameters interact via strong asymmetric logical implications and weak partly symmetric influences, which can produce critical slowing down through a novel mechanism of percolated freezing. Candidates should be keen to develop new mathematical and computational approaches and enjoy learning about issues and narratives in scientific communities other than theirs. Applications online, enquiries by e-mail.

Liminar meetings resumed...

limbo
(Luca Viviani, 1998)
After the COVID-19 pandemic had confined us to e-venues, we have had the opportunity to experience again the pleasure of meeting in person, including at Mind the Gap, which brought us across multiple disciplinary boundaries, to look at space with others' eyes. Ears. Noses. Thanks Tereza
Mind the Gap
and Julie


...amidst unconfirmed reports of life beyond limbo
zoom with Pyongyang
(some survivors at FENS 2022)

No beginning and no end

Our research lines are a confusing web of recurrent themes feeding back on each other. The categorization into webpages is just meant to affect a sense of direction and perspective. Which you may lose, when coming to visit us in Trieste. Our campus at Sanatorio Santorio Santorio will anyway offer you a view of the gulf, as well as test your alliterative capacities.

The Gulf in Green 



Want to try your memory? face tests! in Italian or in English.

Want to read an overview of our evolutionary perspective? Try this chapter from the Les Houches 2003 summer school.

Want to be confused by our research strategies? This PowerPoint presentation (from December, 2004) should leave you perplexed.

Want to understand limbo psychodynamics? It is complicated, but the Piaroa provide an inspiring cultural reference.



Coordinates

We are located in the former Santorio Hospital, at the edge of the Carso overlooking Trieste. It can be reached with the Tram de Opcina (when it operates, which is never) or with bus 38, both from piazza Oberdan.

From days bygone:
Closing day  
The Italian government is currently bent on destroying public education, behind the thin disguise of a desirable reform of the university system, and of necessary budget cuts. It has first targeted primary schools, the pride of the Italian system, and it is rapidly attacking public high schools, universities and research in general. Obedient media are mounting a campaign of generic delegitimation, by focusing on cases of corruption and mismanagement, unfortunately frequent in the university system. As an international research group in an international graduate school, with limited dependence on Italian public funds, we express our support for the vast majority of gifted and hard-working educators and researchers affected by the government action, and our concern for the disaster impending on Italy's future (Nov. 2008).
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