Satellite Meetings

Laying down a path while walking: Thirty Years of Neurophenomenology

The year 2026 will mark the 30th anniversary of Francisco J. Varela’s seminal paper, “Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem”, which laid the foundations for a revolutionary research program in consciousness science braiding subjective experience with neuroscience.

This two-day satellite workshop (July 4–5, 2026), taking place in Varela’s homeland, will honour the occasion by bringing together cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, and philosophy, to look back on 30 years of neurophenomenological research and outline emerging directions in the field.

We invite submissions that contribute to a deeper understanding of combining lived experience with third person methods in the study of consciousness, with a special emphasis on methodological standards, multimodal data integration, experiential rigor, and empirically grounded approaches. We foster submissions that critically engage with the progress, challenges, and future directions of neurophenomenology.

In the spirit of the neurophenomenological tradition, the satellite will include guided experiential sessions interwoven with the scientific program. These structured sessions will invite participants to engage directly with methods such as micro-phenomenology, attentional training, and interoceptive tracking, with the aim to cultivate a shared experiential ground to complement methodological and theoretical discussions in an embodied fashion.

CONSCIOUSNESS COMMONS:
Building Collaborative Science with Open Consciousness Data

Call for Participants July 4–5, 2026 (following ASSC)
Location: Santiago, Chile

Consciousness Commons is a two-day collaborative satellite workshop following ASSC 2026 that brings together early-career researchers to develop new scientific projects using open datasets in consciousness science.

Participants will work in interdisciplinary teams to formulate hypothesis-driven research questions and develop rigorous analysis plans using openly shared datasets, including the Cogitate consortium datasets.

The workshop combines hands-on exposure to open scientific workflows with structured collaborative project development and guidance on preregistration and reproducible research practices. Over the course of the event, participants will work together to design a new research project that tests a clearly defined hypothesis about the neural correlates of consciousness or evaluates predictions derived from competing theoretical frameworks. By the end of the workshop, each team will have produced a preregistered research plan specifying their hypotheses, dataset, and analysis pipeline.

Teams will subsequently have the opportunity to compete for $25,000 in seed funding to support their project after the event. In this way, Consciousness Commons aims not only to train early-career researchers in open and collaborative science, but also to catalyze new research initiatives that leverage shared datasets to advance the scientific study of consciousness.