Cassian came to psychology from philosophy, completing a doctorate at the University of Edinburgh on the epistemology of testimony before retooling as an experimental researcher at Amsterdam. He is not a believer in precognition or telepathy — he is, if anything, congenitally sceptical — but he argues that the persistent failure to nail down exactly why these effects appear and disappear is itself a signal worth taking seriously. His work in the Anomalous Cognition program focuses on the cognitive and perceptual mechanisms that generate experiences of impossibility, and on developing adversarial designs that are genuinely hard for motivated reasoning on either side to game. He joined the Institute in 2022.