Kyle Cahill

I am a Ph.D. physicist specializing in neurophysics, trained at Georgia State University under Dr. Mukesh Dhamala. My research bridges fundamental physics with cognitive neuroscience to uncover the physical principles underlying brain dynamics, cognition, and subjective experience.

I focus on multimodal brain imaging, and neural network dynamics. I have created and continue to apply physics-based theoretical frameworks such as Cognitive Resource Theory (CRT) and its generalizations, Neural Resource Theory (NRT) and Dynamic Resource Theory (DRT)—to explain how energy is allocated and reallocated in the brain during perception, decision-making, learning, neuroplastic adaptation, and emotional-motivational states.

Core areas of investigation include:

• Executive Function & Decision-Making: Modeling how cognitive control and behavioral flexibility emerge from dynamic neural reconfiguration under energetic and structural constraints.
• Attention, Awareness, & Sensory Integration: Studying how attention modulates conscious perception through multisensory integration, salience detection, and the temporal binding of experience.
• Memory, Learning, & Neuroplasticity: Examining how skill acquisition, habit formation, and experience-dependent plasticity reflect energy-efficient network refinement, especially in cognitively demanding environments such as action video games.
• Emotion, Motivation, & Conation: Investigating how affective states, internal drives, and volitional processes modulate brain network dynamics, shaping perception, learning, and decision-making through energetic prioritization and homeostatic regulation. These processes form the motivational substrate for adaptive behavior and are essential to understanding subjective experience as an embodied, energy-constrained phenomenon.
• Insight, Creativity, & Cognitive Reallocation: Exploring how novel ideas and sudden breakthroughs emerge through dynamic shifts in neural resource allocation guided by entropy gradients, phase synchrony, and internal free energy minimization.
• Conscious States & Transitions: Using energy-based models and connectivity analyses to characterize wakefulness, sleep, and altered states (e.g., meditation, psychedelics), with the aim of rigorously defining consciousness as a physically grounded dynamical system.
• Brain and Behavior Coupling: Linking neuroimaging measures of network dynamics to embodied cognition, behaviorally induced neuroplasticity, and emergent phenomena such as flow states and placebo effects demonstrating how subjective experience arises from dynamic physical processes.

I am particularly committed to developing a unified theory of neural function grounded in first-principles physics. My recent work includes modeling neuroplastic refinement to explain enhanced visuomotor decision-making in action video game players, developing novel neuroimaging methods such as region-cumulative PCA (rcPCA), and applying quantum-inspired techniques to the analysis of BOLD fMRI time series. These empirical efforts support a broader theoretical aim: the formulation of a physically coherent, resource-based account of cognition (CRT), neural function (NRT), and emergent self-organizing physical systems more generally (DRT).

Outside of research, I enjoy walking, playing video games, traveling, and stoking my curiosity through art, philosophy, and scientific exploration beyond my immediate field.