ECSU updates (October 2026)

September brought a new doctor, an award, a new paper and a trip to Kyoto. The corridor also got noticeably fuller.

Congratulations, Dr. Takada. Kazuma Takada has been awarded his PhD, with the degree conferred at the very end of the month. A preprint from his thesis work, with Wen Wen and Shunichi Kasahara, is out on Research Square: “Voluntary action facilitates self-other discrimination but leaves metacognition unchanged”. Preprint

A paper award. At the Japanese Cognitive Science Society's annual meeting in Osaka, Yuto Kurihara, Rieko Osu and Tom received the JCSS Incentive Paper Award for their paper in Cognitive Studies, which uses irruption theory to interpret inter-brain synchrony and desynchrony. DOI: 10.11225/cs.2025.020 · JCSS awards

Psilocybin and the brain. A collaboration led by Marek Nikolič and colleagues in Prague, with Tom and Pedro Mediano, appeared in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. It links psilocybin-induced EEG changes to both the acute experience and longer-term effects. DOI: 10.1177/02698811261473445

Kyoto. Tom presented “Embodied temporal anticipation” at IEEE ICDL 2026. The classic 37% rule tells you when to stop looking and commit, but it seems to need a clock. In the perceptual crossing experiment, people's bodies appear to approximate it without one.

New faces. Felipe Machado, a PhD candidate at the University of Vienna, joined us as a visiting research student. He opened the term's club seminars with “Enacting Political Economy: Culture, Meaning and Uncertainty Through 4E Cognition”. John Sykes, in his first month as a postdoc, has taken over coordinating the seminars.

Building on our work. Michael Levin's new open-access paper in Philosophies, “Ingressing Minds”, discusses irruption theory alongside other models of how mind makes a difference to matter. We are planning to write a response. DOI: 10.3390/philosophies11050161

Hokkaido. To close the month, Tom and John headed north to Lake Toya for a meeting of the JSPS Qualia Structure Project, posters in hand. JSPS Qualia Structure Project

Coming up. October starts with new arrivals. Hideto Takei joins us today from DENSO as a visiting researcher, and Cameron Filkin, a master's student at the University of Groningen, arrives as a visiting student. Two interns, Aleksandra Psyllos and Pedro Lavin, follow later in the month, and ECogS 2026 is now just weeks away.

More next month.