Steven Laureys
Senior teams are running on depleted attention, fragmented sleep, and chronic stress, and treating it as an HR problem. The cost shows up in slower decisions, weaker judgement, and unwell people, not in a wellbeing dashboard. Most corporate responses to this still rest on intuition rather than what neuroscience can now measure about the working brain.
Steven Laureys is a clinical neurologist and consciousness researcher who shows leaders what neuroscience now knows about attention, stress, sleep, and meditation, and how to apply it inside organisations.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Steven Laureys
- He brings the working brain into board-level conversations on performance and wellbeing, grounded in clinical neurology rather than wellness orthodoxy.
- He runs one of the few research groups in the world studying consciousness across coma, anaesthesia, sleep, hypnosis, and meditation, which gives audiences a single coherent framework for thinking about attention and recovery.
- His Francqui Prize and Canada Excellence Research Chair give a buyer hard evidence of scientific standing in a field crowded with popularisers.
- He has translated his research into a bestselling popular book on meditation, so audiences get a scientist who can talk to non-scientists without losing accuracy.
- He works in English, French, and Dutch, which makes him directly usable across European leadership audiences without an interpreter.
Biography highlights
- Founder and head of the Coma Science Group, GIGA Consciousness, University of Liège.
- Canada Excellence Research Chair in Neuroplasticity, Laval University and CERVO Brain Research Centre.
- Research Director at the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS).
- Winner of the Francqui Prize 2017 and the Generet Prize 2019.
- Author of The No-Nonsense Meditation Book, an international bestseller published by Bloomsbury and translated into multiple languages.
- TEDx speaker at TEDxBrussels and TEDxLiège, with research featured across major international media.
Biography
Most of what is sold to organisations as “wellbeing” is built on intuition. The brain that is meant to be helping is the most expensive and least understood asset on the payroll. Steven Laureys studies the brain for a living, and his work has spent two decades pushing the boundary of what can be measured in coma, sleep, anaesthesia, hypnosis, and meditation.
He founded the Coma Science Group within GIGA Consciousness at the University of Liège in 2014, and now also holds the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Neuroplasticity at Laval University, based at the CERVO Brain Research Centre. He is a Research Director at Belgium’s FNRS and a clinical professor of neurology, board-certified in neurology and in palliative medicine. The Francqui Prize, Belgium’s highest scientific honour, was awarded to him in 2017 for his work on disorders of consciousness.
His public reach is unusual for a clinician of this seniority. The No-Nonsense Meditation Book, published by Bloomsbury, became an international bestseller and made the case for meditation in the language of neuroimaging rather than spirituality. He has spoken at TEDxBrussels and TEDxLiège, and his research has been picked up across mainstream international media.
For corporate audiences, he turns the same instruments he uses on coma patients and Buddhist monks toward the working brain: attention, stress, sleep, cognitive recovery, and the conditions under which people make good decisions. The argument he brings is simple. The science is now specific enough to act on, and most organisations are not yet using it.
Key speaking topics
- Neuroscience of attention and focus
- Stress and cognitive recovery
- Sleep and performance
- Meditation and the brain
- Mental wellbeing in the workplace
- Human intelligence and artificial intelligence
- Consciousness, anaesthesia, and altered states
- Neuroplasticity and lifestyle interventions
Ideal for
- CHROs and chief wellbeing officers are building credible mental health and performance programmes.
- Executive teams and boards are considering attention, sleep, and stress as performance variables.
- Leadership development audiences in healthcare, professional services, and high-stakes operating environments.
- Innovation and R&D leaders interested in the brain science behind creativity and cognitive load.
Audience outcomes
- A clinician’s view of what neuroscience can and cannot yet say about attention, stress, sleep, and meditation.
- Specific, evidence-based practices that senior people can use on themselves and inside their teams.
- A clearer line between credible neuroscience and the wellness industry’s claims.
- Confidence to challenge wellbeing programmes that rest on intuition rather than evidence.
- A working mental model of the brain under load that maps onto real organisational decisions.
Talks
A working tour of what brain science now knows about attention, stress, and recovery, and how leaders can apply it.
Key takeaways:
- How modern neuroimaging redraws the line between credible practice and wellness folklore.
- What sleep, focus, and stress recovery look like inside the brain of a senior decision-maker.
- Where meditation, hypnosis, and other mind-body practices have measurable effects, and where claims outrun the evidence.
A practical session on the neuroscience of recovery and sustained attention for senior teams.
Key takeaways:
- How sleep architecture maps to next-day judgement and decision quality.
- The neural cost of chronic stress and what reverses it.
- Specific interventions that hold up under clinical scrutiny.
A neurologist’s view of what the human brain still does that machines do not, and how that should shape work design.
Key takeaways:
- Where biological intelligence outperforms current AI, and where it does not.
- What this means for the design of human-machine workflows.
- Implications for skills, training, and the future of cognitive work.