Research

What is consciousness?
How does it depend on the brain and the body?

Explaining consciousness

Understanding consciousness is one of the greatest challenges for 21st Century science. How does the wetware inside your skull give rise to rich inner universe of ‘being you’? My mission is to explain how consciousness happens, and to use the insights from consciousness science for the benefit of medicine, technology, and society.

With over 200 academic publications, I have been recognized as a Web Of Science Highly Cited Researcher (2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023) – a list which identifies the top 0.1% of scientists and social scientists by impact of their work. My publications are available through PubMed, Google Scholar, or ORCID.

  • Dreamachine / Perception Census

  • Conscious

  • Being a beast machine

  • Causality, emergence, complexity

  • Phenomenological control

  • Perceptual expectations

  • Active inference and machine learning

  • Time perception and memory

  • Unusual conscious states

  • Extended reality and perceptual presence

  • Metascience

Key publications

Journal papers

Book chapters

Conferences

Preprints

People

Current lab members include Lionel Barnett, Romy Beauté, Trevor Hewitt, Ethan Grove, and David Schwartzman. Joining soon: Robert Chis-Ciure, Luis Lips, Ishan Singhal, and Will Yun-Farmbrough.

Lab alumni: Adam Barrett, Reny Baykova, Edgar Bermudez, Paul Chorley, Clémence Compain, Guillaume Corlouer, Tom Froese, Peter Passaro, Daniel Bor, Colin Reveley, Acer Chang, Peter Lush, Cassandra Gould van Praag, Alberto Mariola, Yair Pinto, Marte Otten, Michael Schartner, Darren Rhodes, Jim Parkinson, Warrick Roseboom, Maxine Sherman, Marta Suarez-Pinilla, Lina Skora, Nadine Spychala, Keisuke Suzuki, and Alexander Tschantz.

Funding

My research and outreach has been supported by the ERC, the EPSRC, the MRC, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), the Wellcome Trust, and the Dr. Mortimer and Theresa Sackler Foundation.