Anvaya Research Lab is a small independent group in Gurugram, India, investigating consciousness, perceptual stability, and subjective experience through behavioural experiments and observational studies.
What We Do
Most of our work focuses on situations where perception becomes inconsistent — moments of ambiguity, fatigue-related drift, or sensory mismatch. We are interested in what these instabilities reveal about the structure of conscious experience.
We work with limited resources but with careful methodology. Our experiments tend to be small (typically 15–40 participants), and we are cautious about generalising from our findings.
Research Focus
How does the brain maintain a stable experience of the world under noisy or degraded sensory input? We study the conditions under which this stability breaks down.
First-person reports remain difficult to work with scientifically. We are developing observational protocols to capture aspects of experience that standard surveys miss.
We explore the relationship between attentional states and reported quality of experience, particularly during monotonous or low-arousal conditions.
Where possible, we study perception outside the laboratory — in domestic environments, during commutes, and in workplace settings. This introduces noise but improves ecological validity.
Current Work
We are currently running a small study on perceptual consistency during extended screen use, with a focus on self-reported visual stability. Early data collection is underway, but results are not yet available.
We are also revisiting our observational protocol for capturing subjective experience — the first version had significant reliability issues, and we are reworking the scoring method.
Team
Anvaya is a small lab. We are three researchers with overlapping interests in consciousness, perception, and experimental psychology. We work from a rented space in Sector 44, Gurugram.
About
Anvaya Research Lab was started in 2022 by Arvind Prakash Srivastava as an independent research group focused on consciousness and perception. The name anvaya — roughly translated as “connection” or “logical link” in Sanskrit — reflects the lab's interest in how disparate elements of experience hold together.
The lab is privately funded through a small amount of angel funding (approximately ₹60 lakh to date) and operates without institutional affiliation. This gives us some freedom in choosing what to study, but it also means we lack the resources, equipment, and credibility that come with being part of a university or research institute.
Arvind Prakash Srivastava (b. 1990, Lucknow) studied physics at the University of Lucknow (B.Sc. Hons., 2012) and Banaras Hindu University (M.Sc. with biophysics specialization, 2014), where his master's dissertation explored neural signal modelling using statistical mechanics frameworks. He completed his PhD at IISER Pune (2015–2018) in an interdisciplinary programme spanning cognitive science and physics, with a thesis on computational modelling of perception and predictive processing.
After his PhD, he spent three years (2018–2021) as a contract research scientist at a private neuroscience startup in Bengaluru, building predictive models for perception-related disorders. He left following a disagreement over the balance between commercialisation and research depth — a decision that was financially risky but not impulsive, preceded by roughly two years of saving.
He publishes occasionally on preprint platforms and in niche journals. His publication record is modest but consistent. He has no major academic awards or high-profile affiliations. His background is solid but not exceptional — a common profile for someone working independently outside the university system in India.
The lab exists because its founder grew increasingly dissatisfied with the constraints of applied research — the pressure to produce commercially viable outputs rather than pursue open-ended questions about consciousness and perception. The shift from a salaried position to independent work was gradual: Arvind spent two years accumulating savings before leaving his role in Bengaluru.
Anvaya began informally in 2021 and was not registered as a formal entity until 2023. Funding has come from personal savings and small private grants from two angel investors with an interest in the overlap between AI and neuroscience. Whether the lab can sustain itself long-term is an open question. The work continues because the questions remain open and the cost of keeping the lab running is, for now, manageable.
We are a three-person lab with limited funding and no institutional backing. Our sample sizes are small. We do not have access to neuroimaging equipment. Our work has not yet been published in peer-reviewed journals (we are preparing our first independent submission). We cannot afford to hire additional staff or purchase specialised hardware. These constraints are real, and they limit the scope and generalisability of our findings.
Anvaya is not a technology company, a startup, or a commercial venture. We do not build products. We are not affiliated with any meditation, wellness, or self-improvement movement. We are not a neuroscience lab — we do not have the equipment for neural measurement. We are a behavioural and observational research group with a specific interest in consciousness and perception.
We are also not contrarian for its own sake. We try to follow standard scientific practices. Where we diverge from convention, it is usually because of resource constraints rather than philosophical disagreement.
Research
Our work is organised around a few connected questions. Progress is slow and nonlinear. We include discontinued directions here because we think transparency about failed approaches is part of honest research practice.
Current Projects
Started: August 2025 · Expected completion: Mid-2026
A behavioural study investigating whether self-reported visual stability degrades during prolonged screen use (4+ hours), and whether participants notice this degradation. We are using a combination of periodic self-report measures and a simple visual matching task.
Data collection is ongoing. n=23 so far. Preliminary patterns are suggestive but not yet statistically meaningful.
Started: January 2026 · Indefinite
We are developing a structured observational method for recording aspects of subjective experience in natural settings. The first version of this protocol (2023–2024) had poor inter-rater reliability. We are revising the coding scheme and testing it with a small group of trained observers.
This is a methods project. There is no hypothesis being tested — we are trying to build a tool that might be useful later.
Started: March 2024 · Paused since November 2025
An experiment exploring whether the subjective quality of experience changes during monotonous tasks, and whether participants can reliably report these changes. Paused due to difficulty recruiting participants willing to commit to the 90-minute protocol.
Discontinued Directions
2023 · Discontinued after pilot
We attempted a study linking binocular rivalry switching rates to subjective time estimation. The pilot (n=12) showed no meaningful relationship, and we lacked the equipment to control stimulus presentation precisely enough. We decided not to continue.
2022–2023 · Discontinued
We conducted semi-structured interviews with long-term meditators about changes in perceptual experience. While the interviews produced interesting qualitative data, we were unable to develop a rigorous enough analytical framework to make the findings meaningful. The topic also risked association with wellness culture, which was not our intention.
Perception typically feels smooth and continuous, but this continuity is constructed by the brain from noisy, incomplete sensory data. We are interested in the mechanisms that maintain this constructed stability — and in the conditions (fatigue, distraction, sensory conflict) where it starts to fail. Our approach is behavioural: we measure what people report seeing and how consistently they can match or reproduce simple perceptual judgments.
The “hard problem” of consciousness — why there is something it is like to have an experience — is not something we expect to solve. Our interest is narrower: can we develop better methods for capturing what people actually experience, beyond what standard psychological surveys measure? This is a methodological challenge as much as a scientific one.
There is good evidence that attention and consciousness are related but not identical. We are exploring this distinction through simple experiments that manipulate attentional load and ask participants to report on the quality (not just the content) of their experience. This work is early-stage and we do not yet have clear results.
Team
The lab currently has three members. We work out of a rented two-room space in Sector 44, Gurugram.
Arvind Prakash Srivastava
Founder & Principal Researcher
B.Sc. (Hons.) Physics, University of Lucknow; M.Sc. Physics (Biophysics), BHU; PhD (Cognitive Science & Physics), IISER Pune. Previously a research scientist at a cognitive modelling lab in Bengaluru (2018–2021). Arvind's primary interest is in computational models of perception and predictive processing — how the brain constructs stable experience from noisy sensory data. He manages the lab's operations, designs experiments, and handles most of the data analysis and modelling work. He is 36 and has lived in Gurugram since 2021.
Meera Nair
Research Associate
M.A. Psychology, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Meera joined the lab in early 2023 after completing her master's thesis on attentional lapses during sustained vigilance tasks. She runs most of the lab's participant sessions and is responsible for data collection and participant coordination. She is also the primary developer of the observational protocol (v2). Before joining Anvaya, she worked briefly at a UX research consultancy in Delhi.
Rohit Bansal
Research Assistant (Part-Time)
B.Sc. Statistics, Hansraj College, University of Delhi (2022). Rohit works part-time at the lab, primarily handling data cleaning, statistical analysis, and literature reviews. He is also enrolled in a distance M.Sc. programme in Applied Psychology. He joined in 2024. His role is primarily technical support — he does not design or run experiments independently.
Lab Notes
Informal writing from the lab. These are not formal publications — they are working notes, observations from ongoing research, and occasional reflections on methodology. We write these primarily for ourselves, but publish them in case others find them useful.
12 March 2026
A recurring methodological difficulty in our work: the act of asking participants about their perceptual experience seems to change that experience...
Read more ↓A recurring methodological difficulty in our work: the act of asking participants about their perceptual experience seems to change that experience. This is not a new observation — it has been discussed extensively in the introspection literature — but it creates practical problems that we haven't fully solved.
In our screen-use study, we ask participants every 30 minutes to rate the “clarity” and “stability” of their visual field. Several participants have told us, informally, that the act of being asked makes them suddenly notice things they hadn't been attending to. One participant said, “I wasn't aware anything had changed until you asked, and then it was like I could suddenly see it had.”
This is a familiar problem in consciousness research, sometimes called “the observer effect” by analogy with physics (though the analogy is imprecise). We don't have a good solution. In v2 of our observational protocol, we are experimenting with less direct prompting — asking participants to describe their experience without using evaluative terms. It's too early to know whether this helps.
The deeper issue is whether any self-report method can access experience without distorting it. We suspect the answer is no, but that some distortions may be more tolerable than others. Working out which ones — that's the project.
28 January 2026
We are sometimes asked why our studies have so few participants. The honest answer is that we cannot afford more. But there is a more considered response worth articulating...
Read more ↓We are sometimes asked why our studies have so few participants. The honest answer is that we cannot afford more — both financially and logistically. Recruiting participants in Gurugram for a study that requires 90 minutes of their time, with modest compensation, is genuinely difficult.
But there is a more considered response. Small-n research is not inherently invalid. In psychophysics, for example, many foundational findings were established with very few participants, sometimes even one. The trade-off is between breadth (generalisability across people) and depth (detailed understanding of individual patterns).
Our current studies fall awkwardly between these. We are not doing true single-case research with dense measurement, nor are we running the kind of large-sample studies that would allow confident group-level conclusions. We are, in a sense, stuck in a middle ground that satisfies neither tradition fully.
We are aware of this and are trying to move toward one pole or the other. The observational protocol project is an attempt to enable the kind of rich individual-level data that could justify smaller samples. But we are not there yet.
09 November 2025
From mid-2022 through early 2023, we conducted interviews with long-term meditators about perceptual changes. Here is why we chose not to continue that line of work...
Read more ↓From mid-2022 through early 2023, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 14 experienced meditators (8+ years of regular practice) about perceived changes in their perceptual experience. The interviews were often fascinating. Several participants described, in remarkably consistent language, a kind of “loosening” of perceptual stability — a sense that the constructed nature of perception became more apparent to them over time.
We stopped for three reasons. First, we could not develop a coding scheme with acceptable inter-rater reliability. Two independent coders agreed on thematic categories only about 55% of the time, which is below the threshold we were comfortable with.
Second, the participant pool was self-selecting in a way that worried us. People who are interested in discussing perceptual changes related to meditation are, almost by definition, people who have a particular interpretive framework. Disentangling genuine perceptual changes from expectations and beliefs turned out to be harder than we anticipated.
Third, and most pragmatically, we were concerned about the lab being associated with the meditation and wellness space. Our interest is scientific, but the topic makes that distinction difficult to maintain in public communication. We may revisit this direction in the future with a better methodology, but for now, it's shelved.
Contact
We are open to correspondence from other researchers, students, and anyone with a genuine interest in our work. We try to respond within a few days, though we are occasionally slow.
hello [at] anvayaresearch.com
Sector 44, Gurugram
Haryana 122003, India
If you are working on related questions and are interested in discussing methodology or potential collaboration, please write to us. We are particularly interested in hearing from others working on subjective experience measurement.
We occasionally recruit participants for our studies, primarily from the Gurugram–Delhi NCR area. If you are interested, email us and we will add you to our contact list for future studies.
We receive occasional enquiries about internships and volunteering. We are unfortunately too small to accommodate interns at this time. We also cannot offer remote research positions. We appreciate the interest and apologise for the limitation.