Adriatica Summer School 2026

Pescara, from 31^st August to 4^th September 2026

 

   

Flyer Adriatica 2026

We invite applicants to attend Adriatica 2026 on “Brain-Body Interactions and Wellbeing”

Adriatica 2026 invites applications to its summer school by the beach, dedicated to advancing the study of brain–body interactions and their role in perception, cognition, consciousness, social behaviour, and wellbeing.

The 2026 edition focuses on the coupling between neural activity and physiological rhythms, and how these interactions contribute to self-awareness, behaviour, emotion, and health. The programme brings together neuroscience, psychology, neurophysiology, computational science, and physics in a structured interdisciplinary setting for scientific training and exchange.

Participants will engage with research on interoception, bodily self-consciousness, peripersonal space, heart–brain and respiration–brain coupling, social synchrony, predictive processing, and brain–body dynamics across wakefulness, sleep, and altered states of consciousness. Particular attention is given to the role of bodily signals in shaping cognition, agency, social interaction, and mental health, including in clinical populations.

The programme includes lectures by internationally recognized speakers, student oral presentations, poster sessions, and hands-on methodological workshops on physiological networks and multiscale brain–body dynamics. It is designed to foster in-depth discussion, methodological training, and direct interaction between early-career researchers and senior scientists.

Set in a coastal location, Adriatica also includes structured social and networking activities, including excursions along the Trabocchi Coast and a group dinner, aimed at fostering informal scientific exchange and community building.

Applications are now open for Adriatica 2026.

Workshop 1 TBA

 

Workshop 2 (Ronny Bartsch)

Title: Physiological Coupling in Practice: From Cardiorespiratory Synchrony to Heart-Brain Interactions

This hands-on tutorial introduces participants to the analysis of coupling between organ systems using real polysomnographic recordings.

Working in a Jupyter notebook (Google Colab, no installation required), participants will extract heart rate and brain wave amplitude from raw ECG and EEG signals, visualize cardiorespiratory coupling via synchrogram analysis, and use Granger causality to detect directed interactions between heart and brain across sleep stages. The session covers the full workflow: signal extraction, stationarity assessment, and interpretation of coupling strength and directionality. The results directly connect to the concepts introduced in the accompanying lecture.

 

Workshop 3 (Yuri Antonacci)

Title: Information-Theoretic Analysis of Brain and Physiological Systems: Methods and Applications

This workshop introduces information-theoretic tools for extracting and interpreting information from physiological signals, spanning single-system dynamics to interactions among brain and body systems. The first part focuses on event-related responses, showing how information-theoretic measures can complement classical ERP analysis by quantifying the information carried by neural signals about experimental events or physiological states. The second part introduces information-theoretic approaches to characterize the hierarchical organization of physiological networks, both within individual organ systems and across different organ systems. Within the framework of information dynamics, the workshop will present different measures to characterize individual system dynamics, bivariate interactions between pairs of systems, and finally multivariate and higher-order interactions with applications in brain and physiological networks. MATLAB examples will illustrate applications to EEG, cardiovascular, and cardiorespiratory signals, highlighting how information theory can provide a unified framework to study brain-body interactions.

 

  SUBMIT HERE  

Venue

Adriatica 2026 will take place in the Pescara province, Italy, at a wonderful four-star hotel by the Adriatic Sea.

 

   

   

 

SCIENTIFIC ORGANIZERS

  

 

Prof.ssa Francesca Ferri	Prof. Marcello Costantini	Dr. Andrea Zaccaro	Prof. Mauro Gianni Perrucci
UDA, DNISC ITAB, TEAM Lab	UDA, DiPsi ITAB, TEAM Lab	UDA, DNISC TEAM Lab	UDA, DNISC ITAB, TEAM Lab
Dr. Francesco Bubbico	Prof.ssa Laura Marzetti	Prof. Vittorio Pizzella
UDA, DiPsi TEAM Lab	UDA, INGEO ITAB, MAMBO	UDA, DNISC ITAB, MAMBO

 

---

SPEAKERS

Titles and Abstracts

 

Micah Allen	Yuri Antonacci "From Brain Dynamics to Brain-Heart Interactions: An Information-Theoretic Perspective"
-------------------------------------------------------	---------------------------------------------
Ronny Bartsch "Coexisting Coupling Modes and Network Interactions in Physiology"	Juliane Britz "BBC – Brain, body and consciousness"
-------------------------------------------------------	----------------------------------------------
Marzia De Lucia "Cardiac and auditory regularity processing in wakefulness, sleep and coma"	Francesca Fardo The thermal grill illusion: a window into how the brain constructs pain
-------------------------------------------------------	----------------------------------------------
Michael Gaebler "Heart-brain coupling and its role for the mind and behaviour"	Ivana Konvalinka "Balancing self and other during dynamic social interactions"
-------------------------------------------------------	----------------------------------------------
Hyeong-Dong Park "Breathing shapes conscious intention and agency"	Gerardo Salvato "Interoception as a Multilevel Scaffold of Well-Being: From Balance to Social Interaction"
-------------------------------------------------------	----------------------------------------------
Andrea Serino "Rethinking Peripersonal Space: Neural Mechanisms Across Space, Time, and the Body"
-------------------------------------------------------

 

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM:

.

HOW TO APPLY

Important Dates:

Early Bird Registration: Submit by June 15 2026 (€ 400)

Final Registration Deadline: Submit by July 31 2026 (€ 450)

Registration Fee Covers:

• Daily coffee breaks and lunches (Monday–Friday)
• Social events on Monday and Thursday nights
• Access to all lectures, symposiums, and workshops
• Trabocchi Coast Experience

Convenient accommodation options are available at the conference location (contact adriatica.summerschool@unich.it for details)

A maximum of 40 students will be accepted. Applications must include: Curriculum vitae and Abstract of your research. Applications will be reviewed by the scientific committee, and accepted applicants will be notified within 10 days of submission. Payment instructions will be provided upon acceptance.

  SUBMIT HERE  

  

> For further information Please contact adriatica.summerschool@unich.it