Morten Kringelbach

Kringelbach’s collaboration with Gustavo Deco produced the 2017 result that the resting brain sits at the edge of a Hopf bifurcation, maximizing metastability, and the pair’s 2020 Cell Reports paper “Brain states and transitions, insights from computational neuroscience” set out the broader program of describing conscious states as regions of a whole-brain model’s parameter space. The 2024 Trends in Cognitive Sciences paper “The Thermodynamics of Mind,” with Kringelbach as lead author, pushed that program explicitly into statistical mechanics, framing entropy production, irreversibility, and departure from equilibrium as the physical quantities a theory of consciousness needs to explain.

That framing is what makes the fluctuation-dissipation theorem the natural next step. A system at thermal equilibrium obeys a fixed relationship between its spontaneous fluctuations and its response to a perturbation. Kringelbach’s whole-brain models had already shown the brain operates far from that equilibrium point during wakefulness, so a direct measurement of how far, and whether that distance tracks conscious state, follows from the modeling program rather than arriving as an external addition to it.

For substrate independence, Kringelbach’s work names the quantity a claim about non-biological consciousness would need to reproduce. It is not a specific molecule or tissue type, it is a dynamical regime, a system driven persistently away from equilibrium in a structured way. Whether any artificial substrate instantiates an analogous regime is the open question his thermodynamic framework puts on the table.

Known for. Whole-brain computational modeling of non-equilibrium brain dynamics, the thermodynamics of mind framework, hedonic and pleasure circuitry

Coverage on this site

• From Cacophony to Hierarchy. The 14-Author Framework for Assessing AI Consciousness October 2026
• Berjaga-Buisan and Kringelbach Track Consciousness Through a Thermodynamic Violation September 2026

Related researchers

• SC Shamil ChandariaGoogle DeepMind Institute; University of Oxford; Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational PsychiatryFree energy principle and active inference, the Beautiful Loop theory, the Complex Brain Hypothesis, lead author of the From Cacophony to Hierarchy AI consciousness assessment framework 2 articles
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• HS Henry ShevlinGoogle DeepMind Institute; Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of CambridgeResearch on AI consciousness and welfare assessment, the moral uncertainty programme at Cambridge, co-author of the cacophony assessment framework Functionalist1 article

Morten Kringelbach is listed with the other biological naturalists, who hold that consciousness requires living metabolic hardware. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.