Gustavo Deco

Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Engineering Sciences

Gustavo Deco is Research Professor at ICREA and Professor (Catedrático) at the Pompeu Fabra University where he leads the Computational Neuroscience group. He is Director of the Center of Brain and Cognition (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 was postdoc of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the University of Giessen in Germany. From 1990 to 2003, he lead 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. He was awarded with the ERC Advanced Grant.


Research interests

Perceptions, memories, emotions, and everything that makes us human, demand the flexible integration of information represented and computed in a distributed manner. Normal brain functions require the integration of functionally specialized but widely distributed brain areas. The main aim of my research is to elucidate precisely the computational principles underlying higher brain functions and their breakdown in brain diseases. My research allows us to comprehend the mechanisms underlying brain functions by complementing structural and activation based analyses with dynamics. We integrate different levels of experimental investigation in cognitive neuroscience (from the operation of single neurons and neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, neuroimaging and neuropsychology to behaviour) via a unifying theoretical framework that captures the neural dynamics inherent in the computation of cognitive processes.

Selected publications

– Saenger VM, Ponce-Alvarez A, Adhikari M, Hagmann P, Deco G & Corbetta M 2018, ‘Linking Entropy at Rest with the Underlying Structural Connectivity in the Healthy and Lesioned Brain‘, Cerebral Cortex, 28(8):2948-2958.

– Hindriks R, Micheli C, Bosman CA, Oostenveld R, Lewis C, Mantini D, Fries P & Deco G 2018, ‘Source-reconstruction of the sensorimotor network from resting-state macaque electrocorticography‘, Neuroimage, 181:347-358.

– Gilson M, Tauste Campo A, Chen X, Thiele A & Deco G 2018, ‘Nonparametric test for connectivity detection in multivariate autoregressive networks and application to multiunit activity data‘, Network Neuroscience, 1(4):357-380.

– Tauste Campo A, Principe A, Ley M, Rocamora R & Deco G 2018, ‘Degenerate time-dependent network dynamics anticipate seizures in human epileptic brain’, PLoS Biology, 16(4):e2002580.

– Daffertshofer A, Ton R, Kringelbach ML, Woolrich M & Deco G 2018,’Distinct criticality of phase and amplitude dynamics in the resting brain‘, Neuroimage, 180(Pt B):442-447.

– Daffertshofer A, Ton R, Pietras B, Kringelbach ML & Deco G 2018, ‘Scale-freeness or partial synchronization in neural mass phase oscillator networks: Pick one of two?‘, Neuroimage, 180(Pt B):428-441.

– Deco G, Cruzat J, Cabral J, Knudsen GM, Carhart-Harris RL, Whybrow PC, Logothetis NK, Kringelbach ML 2018, ‘Whole-Brain Multimodal Neuroimaging Model Using Serotonin Receptor Maps Explains Non-linear Functional Effects of LSD‘, Current Biology, 28(19):3065-3074.

– Glomb K, Ponce-Alvarez A, Gilson M, Ritter P & Deco G 2018, ‘Stereotypical modulations in dynamic functional connectivity explained by changes in BOLD variance’, Neuroimage, 171:40-54.

– Deco G, Cabral J, Saenger VM, Boly M, Tagliazucchi E, Laufs H, Van Someren E, Jobst B, Stevner A & Kringelbach ML 2018, ‘Perturbation of whole-brain dynamics in silico reveals mechanistic differences between brain states’, Neuroimage,169:46-56.