Why effort feels effortful is the question that organises our work. Effort is not read off the muscles; the brain constructs it, inferring the state of the body and the cost of acting on it. That construction can go wrong, and the result is fatigue — not weakness, not low motivation, but a shift in how the brain represents the body. The Effort Lab studies that shift.

​

We ask how the brain predicts the sensory consequences of its own actions, attenuates the signals it expects, and estimates what a movement will cost before it is made. Our methods span psychophysics, transcranial magnetic stimulation, EEG, magnetic resonance spectroscopy and computational modelling.

​

We test these ideas in healthy volunteers, where fatigue builds and resolves within an afternoon, and in people living with fatigue after stroke, where it does not. Fatigue is common across disease and largely untreatable, because we do not yet know what it is. We think it is a brain state: measurable, and therefore modifiable.