Enzo Tagliazucchi

Enzo Tagliazucchi is the head of the Consciousness, Culture and Complexity Group at the Buenos Aires University, a Professor of Neuroscience at the Favaloro University, and a Marie Curie fellow at the Brain and Spine Institute in Paris. His main interest is the study of human consciousness as embedded within society and culture.

CV

Members of his research group represent different disciplines, including physics, engineering, biochemistry, psychology, computer science, and ethnobotany. His ongoing projects aim towards linking the phenomenology of non-ordinary states of consciousness to neurophysiological and neuropharmacological data. We are also interested in how cultural diversity influences consciousness and vice versa. We use tools ranging from natural language processing to chemical informatics and molecular dynamics, and to whole-brain neuroimaging and computational modelling of brain activity. Field studies of the neural and psychological effects of DMT are the first experiments with psychedelics conducted in Argentina and are expected to be the cornerstone for many future experiments of psychedelics in context. Since the human use of these compounds originates in what is now Latin America, Enzo is highly invested in his “dream project” of creating a Latin American Institute for the study of natural psychedelic molecules consumed in natural environments.

Enzo Tagliazucchi studied physics and neuroscience at the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina) and at the University of Frankfurt (Germany), then held postdoctoral positions in Germany, Amsterdam, and Paris. Currently, he is a tenured researcher and professor at the University of Buenos Aires. Leading a collective effort towards the interdisciplinary study of consciousness, he supervises a group of approximately 10 PhD students, postdocs, and tenured researchers, coming from an ample range of disciplines (e.g. physics, computer science, biochemistry, psychology, engineering, ethnobotany). They share a common interest to improve our understanding of human consciousness and its two-way relationship with the culture where it is embedded. Tagliazucchi has published over 60 research articles on altered states of consciousness from different perspectives, including the first neuroimaging study of the acute effects of LSD in humans.

He is a member of the ALIUS research network.