Acknowledgements

Honestly, I should acknowledge my debts with the authors of most of the books I have read.

However, there are at least three people I must name:

Eric Kandel, Nobel prize for Medicine in 2000 for his studies on the cellular bases of memory, that have given a revolutionary contribution to our understanding of neural plasticity: his textbook has been for me instrumental in understanding what I have understood about neurophysiology of higher functions;

Douglas Hofstadter, to whom I am deeply indebted for his splendid treatise about the META, and switching between cognitive domains and ontological realms (“Gödel, Escher and Bach”)

and

Noam Chomsky, for his illuminating views on the structure of languages, and of natural languages in particular.

I hope none of them will be angry at me for how I may have deformed their original ideas.

This book is dedicated to a most brilliant actress, Lella Costa, a lucid, amusing, exciting and passionate artist, and a wonderful person, caring and untiring fighter for women rights and for any just battle, for peace, justice and solidarity. I had the fortune of encountering her, we discussed these themes and she stimulated me to collect these notes. Most ideas and views in this book matured in intense, stimulating and crazy discussions with her − never knowing who was serious and who was joking. She even cuddled the idea of actively collaborating to writing, and I sincerely hoped she would: how much more varied, intriguing, stimulating and amusing everything here would have been!

But there have been so many things to do, and to say; too many battles had to be fought. Who knows, maybe next time...