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.

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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, functional magnetic resonance imaging and computational modelling.

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We test these ideas in people living with fatigue after stroke. Fatigue is common across disease and largely untreatable.