In this final lecture in the Ouvertures 2025-2026 series, Philippe Albouy, holder of the ILCB/Iméra Chair – Language, Communication and the Brain, takes us on a journey to the heart of contemporary neuroscience research. Registration is required to attend this conference.
Credit: Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.
Journey to the heart of contemporary research
The human brain is one of the most complex systems we know. But how can science ‘listen’ to its activity and try to understand it nowadays?
This lecture offers an accessible insight into the heart of modern neuroscience, based on a very real medical situation: the monitoring through intracerebral electrodes (SEEG) of patients suffering from drug-resistant epilepsy. These recordings, made primarily to improve clinical management, also offer a unique opportunity to observe human brain activity directly. They enable researchers to study how the brain processes information from our environment and enables essential functions such as communicating, learning and speaking.
We will see how this brain data can be combined with artificial intelligence tools. Far from the fantasies of “mind reading”, AI is used here as a powerful analysis tool: it helps to detect complex patterns in brain signals and to test hypotheses about how the brain works.
Through concrete examples, this conference will show what artificial intelligence can – and cannot – teach us about the human brain, and why this research is essential for medicine, the understanding of cognition and the study of what makes us human. Finally, we will discuss the crucial role of rare data sharing and open science in accelerating discoveries.
This conference will be chaired by Daniele Schön, CNRS research director at the Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes (INS, UMR 1106 amU/Inserm).
Practical information
- Date: Thursday 2 April 2026 from 5.30 pm to 7.30 pm
- Venue: Maison des Astronomes conference room, Iméra, 2 place Leverrier 13004 Marseille
- Language: this conference is in French.
- The room can only accommodate 50 people. Registration is therefore compulsory.
Past conferences:
- Thursday, November 13th, 2025: When anti-racism became postcolonial: the anti-racist turn of the 2000s between colonial memory and the “race question” by Itay Lotem, Senior Lecturer at the University of Westminster, London, UK.
- Thursday, December 11th, 2025: My love affair with cancer: exploring the disease through comics by Josune Urrutia Asua, artist, illustrator and cartoonist.
- Thursday, January 15th, 2026: The price of democracy by Asensio Robles-Lopez, Adjunct Professor, Pontifical University of Comillas, Madrid, Spain.
- Group session – Thursday, February 12th, 2026: Contested history by Brian Sandberg, Professor of History at the Northern Illinois University, Chicago, USA.
- Thursday, March 12th, 2026: But who wants to take down the University? by Abdoulaye Gueye, Professor of Sociology, University of Ottawa, Canada.
About the Ouvertures cycle
The Ouvertures series of meetings is aimed at teacher-researchers, doctoral students and curious and passionate citizens, with the firm intention of keeping open and bright a space of intelligence, curiosity and collective discovery in an increasingly dark age, in which these kinds of spaces are shrinking or disappearing.
During the Ouvertures meetings, international scientists and artists in residence at Iméra will offer an insight into their research on sensitive subjects, conducted without taboos and with honesty.
