ABOUT THIS EPISODE
In the early 2000s, Dr. Peter Bruza was near the top of his field in information retrieval when he noticed the math behind search engines looked a lot like quantum mechanics. A colleague pulled him aside on a conference bus to tell him he was trashing his career. Two decades later, a grant reviewer still wrote, "I simply do not believe in the existence of these indeterminate cognitive states." Dr. Bruza built a field on exactly that belief.
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Links:
📖Substack: https://superposeddecisions.substack.com/
📺YouTube: @Superposed_Decisions
🤝LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidan-m-lewis/
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Dr. Peter Bruza recently retired from the Queensland University of Technology, where he co-authored the field's foundational textbook, Quantum Models of Cognition and Decision, with Jerome Busemeyer (2012; second edition 2024). His first quantum cognition grant nearly died on a single reviewer's verdict that the idea "can't possibly be true" before an expert panel overrode it. Later, with funding from the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research, his team asked people to judge whether faces were real or AI-generated alongside a simulated AI, then rate their trust in it from 0 to 100. Trust swung up and down far more than expected, and a quantum model predicted those swings better than a classical Markov model. His work now pushes toward the experiencing mind: consciousness, qualia, and what Zen Buddhism and Bohr's physics share about a reality we can't fully represent.
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What you'll take away:
Why "you haven't decided yet" can be a real state of mind, not just missing information, and why that changes how we model jurors, voters, and ourselves
How trust in AI behaves less like a dial and more like a wave, and why predicting its decline matters before human–machine teams face a real crisis
Why Bruza tells young researchers to follow passion over citation counts, and what a career built on an unpopular bet looks like from retirement
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Primary Sources:
Busemeyer, J. R., & Bruza, P. D. (2024). Quantum Models of Cognition and Decision: Principles and Applications (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/quantum-models-of-cognition-and-decision/9EEF7415DEA574E82F695AB7D0E13713
Tsuchiya, N., Bruza, P., Yamada, M., Saigo, H., & Pothos, E. M. (2025). Quantum-like Qualia hypothesis: From quantum cognition to quantum perception. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1406459. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1406459
Bruza, P. (2025). Bridging Quantum Physics and Human Cognition with Nishida's Logic of Basho. Philosophy East and West, 75(3), 528–543. https://doi.org/10.1353/pew.2025.a965460
Roeder, L., Hoyte, P., van der Meer, J., Fell, L., Johnston, P., Kerr, G., & Bruza, P. (2023). A Quantum Model of Trust Calibration in Human–AI Interactions. Entropy, 25(9), 1362. https://doi.org/10.3390/e25091362
van der Meer, J., Hoyte, P., Roeder, L., & Bruza, P. (2025). Modeling the quantum-like dynamics of human reliability ratings in Human-AI interactions by interaction dependent Hamiltonians. arXiv:2504.13918. https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.13918
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Secondary Sources:
