He is currently full professor of general linguistics at the Institute for Advanced Study IUSS Pavia and the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, and founder and former director of NeTS and of the Department of Cognitive Behavioural and Social Sciences.

He is a member of the Academia Europaea and the Pontifical Academy of Fine Arts and Letters of the Virtuosi al Pantheon.

The result was that not only do the shape of the two different waves correlate but they do so also in the absence of sound production, that is during inner speech activity, opening the possibility of reading linguistic expression from the direct measure of the cortex and skipping the actual utterance of the sentence.

[5] For a non-technical synthesis of these discoveries and a critical discussion see "Impossible Languages" which received the honourable mention at the PROSE Awards.

This was done by exploiting sequences of words with the same sound but different syntactic structure[7] In his essay "La razza e la lingua" he offers arguments against racism showing that there exist two ideas which look innocuous if considered as separated but which are extremely dangerous if combined: first, that there are languages which are better than others; second, that reality is perceived and though elaborated differently, according to the language one speaks.

His second novel describes love and friendship, vendetta and murder starting from the struggle of two theater companies deflagrating in Milano in 1978 and ending in Genève.