The Future of Cognition

Please take a few minutes to watch this video. Below it is a written description of what I talked about in the video - see the last section for the most important part :)

Please check out the rest of the site as well for more about me.

Health Is Becoming Consumer-Driven

We’re in the middle of a massive shift: health is becoming personalized, proactive, and powered by consumers. WHOOP, Oura, Apple Watch, Function Health, and Superpower show that people are no longer waiting for the medical system to guide them, they’re actively investing in understanding their bodies.

Cognitive Health Is the Next Frontier

And yet the organ most important to us, the brain, is still completely unmeasured.

55 million people live with dementia today, heading toward 139 million by 2050.

Anxiety and depression drain over $1 trillion a year in productivity.

Baby boomers fear cognitive decline more than heart disease or cancer.

Young professionals are obsessed with maximizing focus without burning out.

But today’s wearables offer nothing direct about cognition. HRV is vague and easily confounded; readiness scores feel opaque and ungrounded in real cognitive physiology.

I moderate two of the largest biohacking communities on the internet (900k+ across r/Biohackers and r/HubermanLab), and the pattern is unmistakable: people are desperate for a reliable way to measure cognitive readiness, focus, mental energy, and long-term brain health.

Even top neurotech influencers say their biggest audience aren’t young techno-enthusiasts, but baby boomers looking for tools to keep their minds sharp.

Press outlets (Fitt Insider, Business Insider, The Guardian) are already calling cognitive metrics the next big wave in wearables.

The demand is there. The pain is there. The fear is there. The opportunity is there.

The New Wave

Smart glasses are taking off, and all the major tech giants are racing to release their flagship consumer smart glasses: Meta, Apple, Google, Amazon. In the upcoming generations, they are all already filing IP, making acquisitions, and releasing research products to add inward-facing eye tracking hardware. Tech players are interested in including eye tracking for UX/control reasons, but these cameras unlock something game-changing for cognitive tracking:

Passive, all day wearable eye tracking, a window into:

  • cognitive load

  • fatigue

  • arousal

  • circadian alignment

  • mental readiness

For the first time, we have a scalable, reliable, clean cognitive-sensing channel built directly into a form factor millions of people are already excited to buy and wear on their faces.

The Opportunity

Today, pupillometry is stuck in the lab. It’s treated as a single-session, controlled-light tool—great for acute measurements, completely unused for long-term understanding. Researchers have mapped out the moment-by-moment relationships (like cognitive load → pupil dilation), but no one has explored what happens when you track these signals continuously over days, weeks, and months.

Wearable eye tracking changes everything.

We can collect eye tracking/pupillometry data passively, across real life, across real environments, across real time. This unlocks an entirely new frontier: longitudinal cognitive modeling—the same shift that transformed heart rate from a quirky lab measurement into the backbone of WHOOP and Oura to revolutionize how we understand our physical health, and now being used by Apple Watch for FDA regulated hypertension detection.

We’re building the algorithms, models, and metric layer that turns raw pupil signals into daily cognitive intelligence. Just as WHOOP owns “recovery,” we will own:

  • Mental Readiness

  • Mental Strain

  • Circadian Alignment

  • Brain Age / Cognitive Age

This is the cognitive layer that every smart-glasses platform will need, and we intend to define it.

Click here for more info on these metrics

The Market Is Moving

Neurable, Atlas, and NextSense prove that consumers want cognitive wearables. But these companies were founded on EEG, which absolutely has scientific value—and could even succeed as a niche product—but it runs into the same hard constraints every time:

it requires custom hardware, skin contact, careful placement, motion-stability, and constant signal management.

This is why NextSense, Neurable, and Atlas had to spend a decade developing new electrode chemistries, sensor stacks, and custom signal-processing pipelines, because EEG forces you to build a hardware company first.

Eye-tracking doesn’t.

It works out of the box with existing industry leaders who have already built robust sensing hardware.

And critically, in every domain where real-world cognitive-state measurement already matters: pilots, truck drivers, air-traffic operators, industry standards consistently choose eye tracking over EEG.

This is what makes our approach fundamentally more scalable:

We’re not building electrodes or inventing sensors, we’re building the algorithms layer on top of hardware that already exists and is rapidly proliferating.

Tech giants are putting inward-facing cameras into smart glasses now, which means eye tracking is becoming a default, mass-distributed cognitive sensor with zero friction to adoption. EEG wearables need to win a hardware war; eye tracking rides on top of an existing platform shift.

Your Insight

You taught the world how cognition works. You made people care about focus, arousal, sleep, state shifts, and the biology of being human. You created a global shift in how people think about their mind.

Now, the opportunity exists to take everything you taught and turn it into a daily, living, breathing interface for the brain. Not a lab tool, or headset, but a normal pair of glasses with inward-facing cameras that can read the signals of cognition in the background of ordinary life.

The same way heart rate and steps became the first layer of physical awareness, pupil dynamics and eye tracking will become the first real layer of cognitive awareness. This is the start of how people will interact with their own mind for the next fifty years.

The people who will use this, the ones who want to understand and improve their cognition, were shaped by you. They were raised on your frameworks, and think in the vocabulary you gave them.

As we build the next generation of cognitive metrics, the goal is simple. We want to influence the cognitive habits of an entire generation. And because you sparked the cultural movement that made people care about attention, arousal, and mental performance in the first place, your insights and intuition are necessary in defining how this new frontier takes form.

If this resonates, I want to talk. Because this is one of those moments that only shows up a few times in a lifetime, where the science, the timing, and the cultural movement all line up at once.