Doctor in Biology, director of the UB-EDU1st Neuroeducation Chair and professor and researcher of the Biomedical, Evolutionary and Developmental Genetics Section of the University of Barcelona. His professional and academic career has focused on developmental genetics and neuroscience, and their relationship to learning processes. He has also been a researcher at the University of Oxford and has spent time at other universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. Author of around seventy scientific articles and twenty-six essay and science outreach books, many of them focused on neuroeducation. He collaborates in various media, where he has published more than 700 works. Advisor on neuroeducation issues of the International Bureau of Education of UNESCO. In 2010 he won the European Award for Scientific Dissemination, in 2018 the Teaching Award for his contribution to neuroeducation, in 2019 the Distinction from the Faculty of Doctors of the University of Barcelona and in 2021 the ASIRE award for the activities of the Neuroeducation Chair.

Francesco Tonucci is a recognized educator and associate researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the National Research Council of Italy.

He has dedicated much of his professional life to research on child development, analyzing their thinking, his interaction with the world, his abilities, his needs and his educational requirements.

He is the creator of the international project The City of Children which is widespread in both Europe and Latin America.

He is an tireless advocate for the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

In honor of his long career and contributions to education and innovation, he has received several international awards, such as several honorary doctorates from Spanish and Latin American universities, as well as the Unicef award from the Spanish Committee for the year 2019.

Under the pseudonym FRATO, Francesco Tonucci signs satirical cartoons on themes of education, the city, play, and childhood that invite questioning the system and commitment to transforming our society.

He has published dozens of titles, many of which have been translated into various languages.

Solange Denervaud obtained a BSc. and MSc. in Bioengineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne in 2013. She completed her PhD in Neuroscience at the Lausanne University Hospital, in collaboration with the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, bridging Neuroscience and education (2014-2020). This interest emerged from her first training as a Montessori school teacher (2003-2007). Solange’s research focuses on the impact of the learning environment on the development of core mechanisms of adaptation (i.e., error monitoring, cognitive flexibility, creativity, peer-peer learning) in schoolchildren and teenagers. Lately, her interest has extended to bridging heart and brain signals to investigate adaptive processes in adults. Her work uses a combination of psychophysics, neuropsychology, electroencephalography, and magnetic resonance imaging. Since October 2023, Solange is leading a project at the Swiss Center for Biomedical Imaging (CIBM), federating the different CIBM expertise and techniques into a large research project aiming to break boundaries on education.

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Ed.D., is the Fahmy and Donna Attallah Professor of Humanistic Psychology and a professor of education, psychology, and neuroscience at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, USA. She is the founding director of the USC Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education, or CANDLE. Immordino-Yang received her doctorate from Harvard University in 2005 and completed postdoctoral training in affective neuroscience with Antonio Damasio in 2008. She has since pioneered novel approaches to the study of child and adolescent social-emotional and brain development, and has written extensively on implications for educational practice and policy. She has received numerous national and international awards for her work, and in 2023 was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Education and in 2025 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Holds a degree in Psychology, a Master’s in Neuroscience, and a PhD in Neuroscience (2013) from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). She is currently an Associate Professor of Psychobiology in the Department of Psychobiology and Methodology of Health Sciences at UAB, a collaborating lecturer in the Psychology degree at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), and a guest lecturer in several master’s programs in the field of neuroscience. She has conducted research stays at national and international institutions such as PRBB, Utrecht University, Ottawa University, and the University of La Sabana (Bogotá). She is a member of the UAB Mental Health Core and coordinates the partnership with the AdSalutem Sleep Institute. Her research focuses on the neuroscience of learning, memory, brain plasticity, and neurodevelopment, participating in various research and knowledge transfer projects in these areas. She has published around fifty papers in national and international peer-reviewed journals and is co-author of the book 10 ideas clave sobre neurociencia y educación.

AMI trainer, lecturer and examiner, Baiba Krumins Grazzini is director of elementary training at the Fondazione Centro Internazionale Studi Montessoriani (Bergamo, Italy), an AMI Traning Centre which was founded by Mario Montessori in 1961.

She has been involved with Bergamo’s AMI Elementary training course since 1975, became an AMI elementary trainer in 1986, and a director of training in 1992.

Baiba Krumins Grazzini trained in London with Hilla Patell and Muriel Dwyer (3-6), in Bergamo with Eleonora Honegger Caprotti and Camillo Grazzini (6-12) and in Washington with Margaret Stephenson and Fahmida Malik (as part of her Training of Trainers Programme).

In addition to her work in Bergamo, she has lectured in Spain, Ireland, India and in Japan, where she gave the first elementary training course.

She served on the AMI Pedagogical Committee, now known as the Scientific Pedagogy Group, from 2004 until 2013, and also on the AMI Material Committee during the same years.

Adele Diamond is the Canada Research Chair Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. She received her B.A. from Swarthmore College Phi Beta Kappa (in Sociology-Anthropology & Psychology), her Ph.D. from Harvard (in Developmental Psychology), and was a postdoctoral fellow at Yale Medical School in Neuroanatomy.
She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and has been listed as one the 15 most influential neuroscientists in the world.
Prof. Diamond helped pioneer the now flourishing field of "developmental cognitive neuroscience" and is one of the world leaders on executive functions, self-regulation, and self-control. Her discoveries have improved treatment for medical disorders (ADHD & PKU) and impacted education worldwide, improving millions of children’s lives.
She offers a markedly different perspective from mainstream education in hypothesizing that focusing exclusively on training cognitive skills is less efficient, and ultimately less successful, than also addressing children’s emotional, social, spiritual, and physical needs. She has championed the roles of play, music, dance, storytelling, and physical activity in improving executive functions and academic and mental health outcomes.
Prof. Diamond is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Award for Lifetime Contributions to Developmental Psychology in the Service of Science and Society from the American Psychological Association, the International Mind, Brain and Education Society’s Translation Award (the highest award that society gives) and an honorary doctorate from Ben-Gurion University.

Gustavo Deco is an ICREA Research Professor, a highly prestigious distinction, and Full Professor at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), where he leads the Computational Neuroscience group. He was also Director of the Center of Brain and Cognition from 2001 to 2021 (UPF). In 1987 he received his PhD in Physics for his thesis on Relativistic Atomic Collisions. In 1987, he was a postdoc at the University of Bordeaux in France. From 1988 to 1990, he obtained a postdoc of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the University of Giessen in Germany. From 1990 to 2003, he leads the Computational Neuroscience Group at Siemens Corporate Research Center in Munich, Germany. He obtained in 1997 his Habilitation (maximal academical degree in Germany) in Computer Science (Dr. rer. nat. habil.) at the Technical University of Munich for his thesis on Neural Learning. In 2001, he received his PhD in Psychology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich. In 2012, he received an ERC Advanced Grant and recently in 2022 he received an ERC Synergy Grant. The ERC grants mentioned are European Union funding schemes with very high scientific prestige.

Bàrbara Julbe i Sallés is a journalist. She currently works at RAC1, where she has been the correspondent in the Girona counties since 2008. Since 2021, she has also collaborated with Diari Ara, mainly in the Criatures supplement and the Estils section.

She was the winner of the 2014 Premi Carles Rahola de Comunicació Local for Best Informative Work in the Press for the series of reports “When Age Is an Advantage,” published in La Vanguardia. In 2012 she also won the award for the best printed article about Lloret de Mar for the text “Lloret Through a Woman’s Eyes,” also published in La Vanguardia.

She has been a lecturer in Corporate Communication at the Universitat de Girona (UdG).

Author of the novel "On em portin les ametllers" (Ed. Gregal) about pregnancy loss.

The arts play a key role in people’s emotional and cognitive development, especially during the educational years. In this lecture we will analyze how artistic experiences influence brain maturation and the interaction between the brain’s rational and emotional systems, focusing on the contributions of neuroeducation.

From this perspective, we will explore how music, visual and performing arts, and even movement, science, and philosophy —which can be understood as artistic expressions derived from the human brain— foster processes such as attention, memory, creativity, and emotional regulation, while also strengthening empathy and self-awareness.

Integrating the arts into education not only enhances meaningful learning, but also contributes decisively to students’ well-being and well-being-in-being, understanding education as an integral process that connects emotion, cognition, and relationships.

The most important learning in life occurs in early childhood, spontaneously and independently, as a kind of accidental discovery. This is how children learn to speak and to draw. These accidental forms of learning continue throughout development through experiences of free play outside the home, without the presence of adults, with playmates.

For about forty years, these spontaneous experiences and accidental forms of learning have disappeared due to children’s inability to leave home on their own.

This situation, which affects many Western countries, has produced profound changes in children’s lives: the extension of school hours; the proliferation of afternoon sports and artistic activities, always with a school-like rather than playful approach; the increasingly significant presence of television in children’s lives; the exponential growth of the toy market; and the creation of urban spaces dedicated to children’s play, where children always participate accompanied by adults.

The deprivation of direct and independent experiences for children over two generations is generating serious developmental problems.

Today, these problems are further aggravated by the dangers of mobile phone use from an early age, which have dramatic effects in adolescence, including social isolation, gambling addiction, and even suicide. Through the project “The City of Children”, we propose restoring children’s experience of independent, everyday play through the campaign “I Go Out to Play.”

At school, children do not only learn how to read, write, or do mathematics. They also learn, often without anyone noticing, how to relate to errors. Are mistakes experienced as signals of shame, comparison, and evaluation? Or are they treated as a normal and valuable step in exploration, reasoning, and creativity?

This talk offers a neuroscientific perspective on school as a motivational environment by comparing two profoundly different educational contexts: Montessori education and traditional schooling. Drawing on our comparative studies, we show that educational practices are not developmentally neutral. They are associated with distinct trajectories in the maturation of brain circuits involved in reward processing, memorizing, cognitive risk-taking, and mental flexibility; mechanisms that are central to long-term learning and creative thinking.

In particular, we will discuss how school environments that make errors socially or evaluatively costly may shape children’s expectations, reduce exploration, and promote conformity over innovation. In contrast, contexts such as Montessori, that protect children from judgment during learning appear to support a healthier relationship to errors, more stable curiosity, and brain profiles compatible with higher creativity.

The goal of this lecture is not to make a moral judgment about educational practices, but to open a rigorous dialogue between neuroscience and education: how can we support children during sensitive developmental windows in order to preserve their capacity to learn through exploration, to dare to be wrong, and to develop truly creative thinking?

The proclivity to think and feel deeply about complex issues and ideas is a hallmark human achievement—a foundation of civil society as well as of personal growth. This achievement rests on capacities for transcendent thinking, that is, on one’s abilities and dispositions to consider the broader personal, ethical and systems-level implications that transcend situations and pertain to bigger concepts, values and identities. In this talk, Dr. Immordino-Yang will discuss her neuroimaging and classroom-based studies of adolescents and their teachers, demonstrating how transcendent thinking functions in the brain, the power of emotionally-engaged transcendent thinking to predict adolescents’ future brain development and young adult wellbeing—irrespective of IQ—and the role transcendent thinking may play in protecting the adolescent brain from environmental stress. The findings underscore the active role youth play in their own brain development through the meaning they make of the social world, and help educators think in new ways about the emotional and social work involved in skilled teaching.

Sleep is a key determinant of neurodevelopment and brain health across the entire lifespan. From childhood to adulthood, lifestyles interact with processes of neural maturation, brain plasticity, and epigenetic mechanisms that regulate gene expression, shaping trajectories of development, learning, and adaptation.

During stages of heightened brain plasticity, the nervous system is particularly sensitive to environmental risk and protective factors. In this context, sleep emerges as a fundamental protective factor, whereas chronic sleep disruption is associated with negative effects on cognitive, emotional, and behavioral development. The lecture will explain how sleep acts as a biological modulator of brain development, integrating evidence from neuroscience, developmental psychology, and health research.

The session will also outline the main sleep-dependent learning mechanisms, including memory consolidation, emotional regulation, the maturation of neural circuits, and the functioning of executive functions. Drawing on longitudinal and experimental studies, it will analyze how sleep duration, quality, and regularity influence academic performance, mental health, and adaptive capacity throughout development.

Finally, the session will address evidence-based sleep hygiene guidelines and habits, adopting a preventive approach aimed at promoting healthy neurodevelopment from both health and educational perspectives.

Dr Maria Montessori’s “psychodisciplines” approach transforms traditional subject-based education into a holistic, developmentally responsive curriculum. By aligning academic content with the psychological characteristics and developmental needs of learners, psychodisciplines offer a framework for creating educational experiences that are both intellectually rigorous and deeply meaningful. The approach calls for a reimagining of education —not as the transmission of knowledge but as a process of supporting human development in its fullest sense. In doing so, it challenges educators to design learning environments that nurture curiosity, independence, and a lifelong love of learning, while also preparing individuals to contribute meaningfully to society.

“Executive functions” (EFs) include focused attention, self-control, working memory, flexibly switching perspectives or mindsets, creative problem-solving, strategizing, and planning. They are critical for success in school and in all aspects life, physical and mental health, social harmony, and having a good quality of life. To improve at anything, including EFs, requires practice, lots of it. The distinction between ‘academic’ and ‘enrichment’ activities is arbitrary. Activities such as theatre, dance, sports, carpentry, auto mechanics, wilderness survival, orienteering, and so much more all teach skills critical for success in school and in life. More and more research is demonstrating the value of these activities for EFs and for doing well academically.

For the best EFs and the best academic outcomes, it is also critical to address students’ social and emotional needs. Students’ EFs suffer, and students cannot learn as well, if they are stressed, sad, or lonely. EFs depend on prefrontal cortex (PFC) and interconnected brain regions. PFC is the newest area of the brain over the course of evolution and the most fragile. It is affected first and more severely than any other brain region if anyone is sad, stressed, lonely, or not physical fit, and thus EFs, too, are affected first and most severely by these things.

Even very mild stress impairs the EFs of most people. There are good neurobiological reasons for this. Despite talk of “good” stress, there is no level of stress that is good for most people’s EFs. In particular, feeling stressed because of worries about grades, what others might think of you, or fear of being embarrassed impairs EFs and the ability to do one’s best in school. There is a difference between the excitement and exhilaration of feeling challenged and the anxiety of feeling stressed; joy and the challenge of pushing one’s limits are better motivators than fear or anxiety. Children need to believe in themselves and feel their parents and teachers believe in them. They need to feel heard, and seen, accepted, and valued for who we truly are. teaching.

Understanding how the brain coordinates distributed computation (the way different brain regions work together to process information) across space and time is key to explaining how we adapt our behaviour. We introduce a Cartography of Mind (a detailed map of mental processes) grounded in the Thermodynamics of Mind. This is a simple yet powerful framework inspired by the physics of energy (thermodynamics) that describes how the brain orchestrates itself.

By combining direct measurements of the space–time hierarchy (the organized structure of brain activity over time and across different areas) with causal generative whole-brain modelling (computer simulations that show how brain activity starts and spreads), this approach allows us to understand the physical rules and energy limits of large-scale brain activity.

We first tested this framework using large datasets like the Human Connectome Project (a major scientific effort to map all the physical connections in the human brain), showing a strong link between how the brain is organized and how well healthy adults think and learn. Moving into psychiatry, we found specific ways this hierarchical orchestration (the brain’s ability to coordinate its various levels of function) breaks down in different disorders. This helps us identify clear signs of mental health issues and find new ways to help the brain return to a balanced state.

We also tracked how the brain develops during childhood and adolescence. In children aged 4 to 15, we found that the type of school they attend changes their brain activity: Montessori students performed better academically and creatively. Their brains showed an increase in temporal asymmetry (a sign of healthy, complex brain activity that moves forward in time in a structured way) as they got older, while children in traditional schools showed the opposite.

In teenagers, we used EEG-derived entropy production (a way to measure brain energy and complexity using sensors on the scalp) to find specific risks related to maturity. Teens who matured early faced long-term developmental challenges, while those undergoing fast changes were more affected by outside stress, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Together, these findings provide a unified thermodynamic account of how the brain works—essentially a complete map of how the brain organizes itself in health, illness, and as we grow up.