Research

Focus

  • Consciousness-first approach. The UCCR uses psychedelics and meditation as tools to investigate consciousness, not just as therapeutic interventions.

  • Integrative methodology. While valuing traditional methods, we move beyond disciplinary silos to embrace holistic, ecological, and multilevel approaches to conscious experience.

  • Expansive research. Among other topics, we have a special interest in creativity and meaning, embodiment and environment, individual variation, and the self–world relationship.

Overview

The UCL Centre for Consciousness Research (UCCR) adopts a distinctive, forward-thinking approach to the scientific study of consciousness.

First, we take a consciousness-first approach: Non-ordinary states such as meditation and psychedelics are not simply therapeutic interventions or clinical tools. Instead, we see them as powerful methods for directly altering and illuminating the nature of conscious experience. While the Centre may contribute mechanistic insights relevant to clinical applications, its primary focus is on using these states to explore the foundations of cognition, creativity, insight, and human development.

Second, our integrative methodology moves beyond disciplinary silos. We value and incorporate traditional scientific methods but do not believe they alone are sufficient to explain subjective experience. Historically dominant reductionist approaches—though useful—have left major explanatory gaps in our understanding of consciousness. UCCR embraces a more holistic, ecological, and multilevel philosophy of science that draws on neuroscience, psychology, phenomenology, computational modelling, and beyond. We promote pluralism in both theory and method, and support interdisciplinary collaboration as essential to genuine progress in this field.

Third, we maintain an expansive research focus. Among other topics, the Centre is especially interested in four interrelated areas: (1) creativity and meaning-making, (2) embodiment and ecological context, (3) individual differences and neurophenomenology, and (4) the dynamic relationship between self and world. These domains reflect our commitment to studying consciousness in its richness and diversity, unconstrained by narrow disciplinary conventions.

Topics

  • Studies will explore the mechanisms of how semantics, meaning, and experiences of insight are altered (and potentially enhanced) by the use of meditation and psychedelics.

  • We will explore the embedded and embodied qualities of consciousness by studying the impact of psychedelics and meditation in naturalistic environments.

  • We will employ brain imaging and phenomenological methods to rigorously capture how features of consciousness are modified in individuals and expert practitioners (e.g., meditators and shamans).

  • The sense of self and its relationship to the world is arguably essential to consciousness. We will investigate how these features and their relationship are deconstructed and reconstructed in meditative and psychedelic states.