Hakwan Lau
Neuroscientist
Leading neuroscientist studying the neural mechanisms of consciousness and perceptual metacognition, with research directly relevant to understanding psychedelic states and the neuroscience of subjective experience.
Biography
Hakwan Lau is a neuroscientist whose research centers on the computational and neural mechanisms underlying conscious perception and metacognition — the capacity to accurately assess one's own mental states. He has held appointments at both Riken Brain Science Institute in Japan and UCLA, working at the forefront of consciousness science.
His theoretical and empirical work on perceptual metacognition bears directly on the science of psychedelic states: psychedelics profoundly alter subjective experience and the capacity to accurately monitor one's own mental processes, making consciousness researchers like Lau essential interlocutors for psychedelic neuroscientists. His framework for how the brain generates confidence in its own perceptual reports informs how researchers think about the altered metacognitive states produced by psilocybin and other substances.
Lau's work sits at the difficult intersection of philosophy of mind and empirical neuroscience, contributing to one of the most contested questions in science: what is the neural basis of subjective experience.
Organizations
Why They Matter to the LearnShrooms Community
Understanding how psilocybin alters consciousness requires rigorous theories of what consciousness is and how the brain implements it. Lau's metacognition research provides foundational conceptual tools for interpreting psychedelic neuroscience findings.
