Robin Carhart-Harris
Robin Carhart-Harris is the Ralph Metzner Distinguished Professor in Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, and the founder of the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London. He is an internationally renowned neuroscientist who pioneered the application of modern fMRI and MEG neuroimaging to study psychedelics and altered states of consciousness.
Carhart-Harris introduced the “Entropic Brain Hypothesis,” positing that the richness of conscious experience correlates with the entropy (unpredictability and repertoire diversity) of spontaneous brain activity. In the REBUS model (“Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics”), he integrated the entropic brain with active inference and predictive processing, demonstrating how high-level cortical priors (the Default Mode Network) become relaxed, allowing bottom-up sensory flows and non-linear associations to dominate awareness.
Carhart-Harris’s work demonstrates that conscious flexibility requires a delicate balance between order and entropy, offering critical principles for designing generative AI models that avoid cognitive rigidity without descending into chaotic hallucinations.
Known for. The Entropic Brain Hypothesis (2014, 2018), REBUS model of relaxed beliefs under psychedelics, functional neuroimaging of altered conscious states
Coverage on this site
- Robin Carhart-Harris Entropic Brain Theory Psychedelic Neuroscience and AI Consciousness CS26 2026 August 2026
Elsewhere
Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers, grouped by the position their published work defends. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories.