The 2025 edition of the Cagliari Science Festival opens with an inaugural lecture by Andrea Moro, linguist, neuroscientist, and Professor of General Linguistics at the Scuola Universitaria Superiore IUSS Pavia and the Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa.
His talk, titled “Impossible Languages: the Brain, Machines, and the Gift of Limits”, explores the intersection of human language, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. Moro will address a fundamental question: what explains the “boundaries of Babel”?
His research shows that the syntactic structure of human languages is rooted in the neurobiology of the brain rather than in cultural conventions. Using neuroimaging techniques and awake brain surgery experiments, Moro demonstrated how the brain reacts differently to “impossible languages” — linguistic systems that exceed the biological constraints of human language.
Introduced by Ignazio Putzu, Vice-Rector for Education at the University of Cagliari, the lecture also reflects on the limits of artificial intelligence: if the human brain is bound by structural constraints, machines are “too powerful”, as for them no language is impossible.
As Moro concludes, “we are our limits.”
Andrea Moro, appointed Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (2025), is internationally known for his studies on the relationship between brain and language and for his dialogue with Noam Chomsky on the topic of “impossible languages.”
Andrea Moro
Andrea Carlo Moro is an Italian linguist, neuroscientist, and writer. He is Full Professor of General Linguistics at the Scuola Universitaria Superiore IUSS Pavia, where he served as Deputy Rector for two consecutive terms (2012–2025), and at the Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa. He is a Member of the Accademia dei Lincei and, in 2025, was appointed Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic.
At the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan, he was among the founders of the Department of Cognitive Science (1993) and coordinated the degree programme in Cognitive Neuroscience until 2010.
His research demonstrates that the syntactic structure of human languages is rooted in the neurobiology of the brain, rather than in cultural or social conventions. His approach relies on neuroimaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Moro also develops new methods to study the relationship between the brain and language, in collaboration with neurosurgeons and engineers at the University of Pavia. Using awake brain surgery, his team has measured neuronal activity in language areas not directly involved in sound decoding or production. The core of the experiment compares cortical activity when patients read sentences aloud versus silently, showing that the two processes are almost identical.
In his book I segreti delle parole (The Secrets of Words), Moro engages in dialogue with Noam Chomsky on the relationship between the brain and language, delving into the concept of “impossible languages” and their implications for neuroscience and epistemology.