Reasons for quietude
Grants - my new ERC JUSTICE project, and, separately, the Cognitive Republic project
I’ve been a little quieter this past month than usual, although I did deliver three lengthy pieces - icym them, here they are:
At the risk of self-praise, I’m very happy with the Alien/Xenomorph and Predator pieces. They’ve been in various states of drafting for some time now, and I decided I had to finish them off. Even if you hate movies, and these movies in particular, there is something to be learned from them, if you step back and look at them through a different, brain and behaviour, lens.
ERC JUSTICE project
I’ve been slow for another reason, too. A few weeks ago brought the delightful (but embargoed until today - 6 Nov 2025) news that my colleagues and I have been awarded a European Research Council Synergy grant entitled JUSTICE (or ‘Joining Unique Strategies Together For Interrogative Coercion Elimination’).
The Trinity press release:
An international, interdisciplinary team of researchers, including Trinity’s Shane O’Mara and colleagues from DCU, De Montfort University and Tilburg University, has secured a €10 million European Research Council (ERC) grant to investigate coercive and abusive interrogation practices.
Around the world, coercive and abusive interrogation practices—from intimidation and psychological pressure to denial of rights and physical force—remain widespread. These methods violate human rights, produce unreliable information, and cause serious harm to individuals and justice systems alike.
Corresponding Principal Investigator Prof. Shane O’Mara, from Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience and Trinity’s School of Psychology, and co-Principal Investigators Prof. Yvonne Daly, Dublin City University; Prof. Dave Walsh, De Montfort University; and Dr Bennett Kleinberg, Tilburg University; have been awarded funding of €10,403,517 for the six-year project.
Entitled ‘JUSTICE: Joining Unique Strategies Together For Interrogative Coercion Elimination’, the project will bring together experts from law, psychology, neuroscience, and data science to find out why coercive practices take hold and how to replace them with humane, effective interviewing. JUSTICE aims to protect rights, get reliable information, and strengthen public trust.
Shane O’Mara, Professor of Experimental Brain Research, School of Psychology and Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, explained: “The JUSTICE project is about moving from confession-seeking to truth-seeking. By combining law, psychology, neuroscience and data science, we’ll attempt to pinpoint when and why coercion creeps into interviews, and devise practical ways to prevent it. Our project goal is humane, reliable interviewing that protects the innocent, supports victims, and strengthens public trust in justice.”
This was a journey and a half. Synergy grants have a very high bar: success rates are <10%, and the requirements of the grant application in terms of organisation, level of question definition, thinking, co-ordination are extraodinarily demanding. And an explicit condition of the grant is that it is a meeting of equals focused on ‘a research problem so ambitious, that can not be dealt with you and your team alone’.1
So what’s this grant all about?
Coercive and abusive practices have been used in police custody, interrogation, and other paralegal settings throughout recorded history. Modern practices include sleep deprivation, shackling in stress positions, deprivation of food and liquid, threats with weapons or attack dogs, exposure to extremes of temperature or noise and solitary confinement.
Even during investigations of common crimes, ‘everyday coercion’ (such as inhumane and harsh conditions of custody, distorted and misleading presentations of evidence, undue restricted access to lawyers) is a major and pressing issue across the world.
Laws, policies, and workplace culture often make coercion seem acceptable or even necessary. Many interrogators believe these tactics get results, even when they don’t.
Our project, JUSTICE, is tackling this head-on:
Why does coercion persist?
How do we change the system—and the people in it?
What does a fair, effective interrogation actually look like?
Efforts to eradicate coercive and abusive practices in interrogations of individuals suspected of committing criminal offences across the globe have failed, and prior research has been limited in scope, scale, and ambition. There is a significant and consequential gap in our understanding of why people and systems do not employ effective, human rights-compliant approaches to investigative interviewing.
Brain imaging at scale
During social interactions, people influence each other, and we can now explore the underlying neural, psychological, and social aspects of this influence. Hyperscanning is the process of measuring brain activity in multiple individuals while they interact socially or face cognitive challenges.
I’ll be research-focused on the decision dynamics in small groups: recent advances in fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy hyperscanning technology allow the examination of the underlying neural processes during decision-making in groups: our work will seek to uncover the factors influencing people’s adoption or rejection of coercive and abusive practices, exploring their neural, psychological, and social underpinnings.
Why groups?
Groups make many of our most consequential choices, yet the cognitive neurodynamics supporting effective discussion, error-correction, and consensus remain poorly understood. This project will pioneer the an integrated platform for measuring how ideas and brains move together in small groups.
We will combine multi-person brain imaging (functional near-infrared spectroscopy; fNIRS) with naturalistic conversation analysis to investigate how small groups “think together.”
What’s fNIRS?
fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy) is a relatively new and flexible brain imaging technique – it is one particularly well-suited for group testing due to its non-invasive nature, allowing simultaneous data collection from multiple participants - without significant discomfort or interference. Its tolerance to movements makes fNIRS the imaging method of choice when conducting the research proposed here – investigation of individual cognitive processes in controlled group settings, while facilitating the examination of real-life interactions, and enabling the monitoring of brain activity during natural group tasks.
We’ll post more information in due course as the project goes live.
Cognitive Republic
Cognitive Republic (easy email sign up, so please do sign up) - I would be very grateful for your continued support.
I’ve got a new home for this project - Subscribe here.
Cognitive Republic argues our political systems need to be dramatically reimagined, or they will be out‑competed by populist authoritarian alternatives.
Central premise: democracies that figure out how to experiment, learn, and evolve are the ones that will endure, prosper, while also enriching human psychological flourishing and well-being.
Cognitive Republic offers a bold reimagining of democracy as an evolving, intelligent system: one that perceives, remembers, learns, and adapts. Rather than treating governance as the enforcement of fixed ideologies, it treats policy as hypothesis, failure as feedback, and civic life as collective inquiry.
Cognitive Republic started life as a book proposal: I have decided instead to release it here piece-by-piece, to test the arguments and thinking in public.
There is a better way. Join me - by signing up.
We can do better - so much better.
I have felt like it was time for a new home and new thinking. I’ve been working on this in the background for a long time now, and have decided to work through these ideas in public.
I am so very tired of the stale ideological arguments of the past decade or so: they’ve been pointless and tiresome, and have left us no better off.
I’ve just left these pointless discussions behind, and am thinking through a better route forward.
Cognitive Republic (easy email sign up, so please do sign up)
My substack here won’t die, but it is going to evolve considerably in the future.
Gemini says: ERC Synergy Grants are among the most prestigious and highly coveted research awards in Europe, and indeed globally.1
Their prestige stems from a few key factors that make them stand out even within the already elite European Research Council (ERC) funding schemes.
🏆 Key Indicators of Prestige
Exceptional Scientific Excellence: The sole criterion for all ERC grants, including Synergy, is scientific excellence.2 This means projects are judged purely on the quality of the science, the transformative potential of the research, and the track record of the Principal Investigators (PIs).
Intense Competition and Low Success Rates: The competition is fierce.3 The success rate for Synergy Grants is typically below 10%, and in some years has been as low as 7.7%. This highly selective nature immediately places recipients in an elite group.
Focus on Transformative Collaboration (Synergy): The “Synergy” aspect is what truly elevates this grant. It supports a team of two to four outstanding PIs who bring together complementary skills, knowledge, and resources to address an ambitious research problem that cannot be solved by a single PI working alone.
The project must demonstrate a profound, intrinsic synergetic effect that is genuinely transformative for the field.
Substantial Funding: The grants provide significant financial resources—up to €10 million for a six-year period (with the possibility of an additional €4 million for specific costs like major equipment or relocation).
This level of funding offers the freedom and stability required to pursue genuinely frontier research.
Global Recognition: ERC grants are widely recognized within the international scientific community as a benchmark for top-level, high-risk/high-gain research. Receiving one is a major career achievement, signalling that the PIs are established, world-leading researchers capable of coordinating complex, multi-disciplinary, and international projects.
In short, an ERC Synergy Grant signifies that a group of researchers has proposed a revolutionary, interdisciplinary project of the highest quality, and that all of the PIs have the world-class track record and collaborative capacity to execute it.
Wonderful news, Shane... congratulations to you and the team!