Giulio Tononi
David P. White Chair in Sleep Medicine
Distinguished Chair in Consciousness Science, University of Wisconsin, United Kingdom
Profile – Giulio Tononi
Giulio Tononi is a neuroscientist and psychiatrist based at the University of Wisconsin, where he holds Chairs in Sleep Medicine as well as in Consciousness Science. After studying medicine at the University of Pisa in Italy, he specialised in psychiatry and served as a medical officer in the army before earning a doctorate in neuroscience. Long fascinated by sleep and the reasons we need so much of it, he has worked on human, mouse, and fruit-fly models; explored genetics, proteins, and computer analysis; and, with Chiara Cirelli, developed the ‘synaptic homeostasis’ hypothesis that sleep serves to regulate the excessive synaptic activation of wakefulness. Together with Gerald Edelman, he developed the dynamic core hypothesis, a model of consciousness which he expanded into Integrated Information Theory and has continued to update. In IIT a system’s consciousness is determined by its causal properties and corresponds to a system’s capacity to integrate information, an idea which is supported by the breakdown of information integration in slow-wave sleep, general anaesthesia, and vegetative states.
More biographical information
Profile at The Center for Sleep and Consciousness
Publications
Books and selected papers at The Center for Sleep and Consciousness
Contributions to Scientific American
Quotes on Goodreads
Selected publications relevant to consciousness
Alkire, M., Hudetz, A. G., and Tononi, G. (2008). Consciousness and anesthesia. Science, 322, 876–880. Open-access full text here.
Edelman, G. M., and Tononi, G. (2000a). Consciousness: How matter becomes imagination. London: Penguin. Also published as (2000a) A universe of consciousness: How matter becomes imagination. New York: Basic Books. Google Books preview here.
Edelman, G. M., and Tononi, G. (2000b). Reentry and the dynamic core: Neural correlates of conscious experience. In T. Metzinger (Ed.), Neural correlates of consciousness (pp. 139–151). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Google Books preview here.
Koch, C., Massimini, M., Boly, M., and Tononi, G. (2016). Neural correlates of consciousness: Progress and problems. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 17, 307–321. Paywall-protected journal record here. Direct PDF download (final version) here.
Nir, Y., and Tononi, G. (2010). Dreaming and the brain: From phenomenology to neurophysiology. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(2), 88–100. Open-access full text here.
Tononi, G. (2004). An information integration theory of consciousness. BMC Neuroscience, 5, 42. Open-access full text here.
Tononi, G. (2007). The information integration theory of consciousness. In M. Velmans and S. Schneider (Eds), The Blackwell companion to consciousness (pp. 287–299). Oxford: Blackwell. Google Books preview here.
Tononi, G. (2008). Consciousness as integrated information: A provisional manifesto. The Biological Bulletin, 215(3), 216–242. Open-access full text here.
Tononi, G. (2015). Integrated information theory. Scholarpedia, 10(1), 464. Full text here.
Tononi, G., and Cirelli, C. (2003). Sleep and synaptic homeostasis: A hypothesis. Brain Research Bulletin, 62(2), 143–150. Paywall-protected journal record here. Direct PDF download (final version) here.
Tononi, G., and Edelman, G. (1998). Consciousness and complexity. Science, 282, 5395. Paywall-protected journal record here. Direct PDF download (final version) here.
Tononi, G., and Koch, C. (2008). The neural correlates of consciousness: An update. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1124, 239–261. Paywall-protected journal record here. Direct PDF download (final version) here.
Tononi, G., and Koch, C. (2015). Consciousness: Here, there and everywhere? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 370(1668), 20140167. Open-access full text here.
Video
Consciousness. Talk at Foundational Questions Institute, May 2017
Contributions to Closer to Truth (May 2016), including What is information?, Why is consciousness so baffling?, and more
Consciousness and Integrated Information Theory. FQXi Conference on the Physics of Information, Vieques, Puerto Rico, January 2014
Consciousness and the brain. Lecture on the theory of phi integration. University of Wisconsin, 2007