Alice Mado Proverbio

She teaches Cognitive Neuroscience, Social and Affective Neuroscience and A.I. applied to Neurological Sciences and Brain-Computer Interfaces at the University of Milano-Bicocca. Graduated from the University of Rome La Sapienza, she earned her PhD at the University of Padua and completed her postdoctoral research at the University of Trieste. She has conducted extended research periods abroad at Dartmouth Medical School (New Hampshire) and at the Center for Neuroscience of the University of California. She was a researcher at the University of Trieste and then a faculty member at the University of Milano-Bicocca, where she founded and directs the Cognitive Electrophysiology Laboratory.

Her most recent scientific activity lies at the intersection of social neuroscience, neuroaesthetics, and the neuroscience of music, integrating electrophysiological, behavioral, and computational approaches. She has demonstrated a common neural mechanism for extracting the emotional meaning of voices, language, and music; clarified the role of audio/visuo-motor mirror neurons in musical learning and the ability to play in tune. She has highlighted how the cortical area that reads words (VWFA), located in the left occipito-temporal cortex, corresponds to the orthographic recognition system impaired in surface dyslexia. She has also shown how, in musicians, prolonged practice promotes the development of a dual reading area in the opposite hemisphere, dedicated to musical notation, which can exert a compensatory function in dyslexia, enhancing the ability to read both words and notes. She is the author of over 200 international publications (Google Scholar H-index = 49) and numerous essays, including The Cognitive Electrophysiology of Mind and Brain (2003); Cognitive Neuroscience of Music (2nd ed. 2025); Musical Perception and Creation (2022); Neuroscience and Sex Differences (2024); Electrophysiology of the Mind (2003); Cognitive Psychophysiology (2000).