THE ENTANGLED LOOP: AUTHORS

The trilogy was developed within the International Centre for Flourishing, a collaboration between Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, the Universities of Oxford and Aarhus, and partner institutions worldwide.

Lead authors

Morten L. Kringelbach is Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Oxford and at Aarhus University, and Director of the Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing at Linacre College, Oxford. His work focuses on the brain mechanisms of hedonic and eudaimonic processing, the orchestration of brain function and whole-brain modelling. He is co-author with Gustavo Deco of Whole-brain modelling: Cartography of the dynamics of mind (Oxford University Press, 2025). Personal page.

Gustavo Deco is ICREA Research Professor and Director of the Computational Neuroscience Group at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He is one of the principal architects of the whole-brain modelling field, with foundational contributions to the dynamic mean-field framework, generative effective connectivity, the turbulence model and complex harmonics of brain dynamics. Personal page.

Co-authors

Fernando Rosas is a Lecturer in Informatics at the University of Sussex and Senior Research Fellow at Centre for Eudaimona and Human Flourishing. His work on partial information decomposition and synergistic information theory provides one of the formal underpinnings of the hierarchical-orchestration argument in the Entangled Loop. Personal page.

Ruben Laukkonen is the director of the FLIP (Flourishing Intelligence Programme) at the Centre for Eudaimona and Human Flourishing, which he also co-directs. Ruben has made significant contributions to the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness, meditation, and insight. His work also reveals a pathway towards better and safer artificial intelligence based on the science of consciousness and contemplative wisdom. He is the first author of the Beautiful Loop framework on which the Entangled Loop builds. Personal page.

Shamil Chandaria is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, with research interests in active inference, the philosophy of mind and the architecture of consciousness. He is co-author of the Beautiful Loop framework. Personal page.

Yonatan Sanz Perl is a Researcher at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona and the University of San Andrés in Buenos Aires. His work spans whole-brain modelling, dynamical-systems characterisation of brain states, and the development of generative models for clinical neuroscience. Personal page.

Elvira Garcia-Guzman is a Researcher at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, working on whole-brain modelling and computational neuroimaging of adolescent mental health. Personal page.

Jakub Vohryzek is a Research Fellow at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, working on whole-brain modelling and computational neuroimaging. Personal page.

Diego A. Pizzagalli is the Founding Director of the Noel Drury, M.D. Institute for Translational Depression Discoveries. The main goals of his research are to improve our understanding of the psychological, environmental, and neurobiological factors associated with mood disorders, particularly major depression. To this end, he integrates behavioral, electrophysiological, neuroimaging, and, more recently, pharmacological approaches to investigate three putative endophenotypes of depression: anhedonia (loss of pleasure), increased stress sensitivity, and executive function deficits. Personal page.

Institutional affiliations

– Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, Linacre College, University of Oxford
– Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford
– Center for Music in the Brain, Aarhus University
– Computational Neuroscience Group, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona
– Center for Translational Neuroscience, University of California, Irvine
– International Centre for Flourishing (Oxford, Barcelona and Aarhus)

Funding

The work was supported by large number funding bodies, including The Pettit Foundation, Carlsberg Foundation, Cillo Foundation, Danish National Research Foundation, ERC (Synergy, advanced and consolidator awards) and contributing institutional funders. The full funding statements appear in each of the three papers.

Acknowledgement of collaborators

The Entangled Loop builds on a wider community of researchers in whole-brain modelling, the thermodynamics of mind, and the philosophy of consciousness. We are grateful in particular to Karl Friston for the active-inference framework that the Beautiful Loop and the Entangled Loop draw on, to Antoni Khrennikov for the Växjö interpretation that underwrites the quantum-like framing, to Gregory Scholes for the contextual coupled-oscillator analysis that grounds the empirical case for quantum-like effects in classical systems, and to the many colleagues whose contributions are acknowledged in the individual papers.

Contact

For questions and collaboration enquiries, see the contact page.