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Christian Howell

Sep 24, 2026

9:22
Tell us how this amazing idea, kind of two people collided with one half of the equation, each of them, and suddenly it was like, wow, that's amazing.
9:33
To your point about using analogies, I'll use one here, which is we think about orchestration all the time and coherence.
9:39
It's amazing how much orchestration had to happen for this technology to come forward.
9:45
You're right.
9:45
The first principle challenge of Cognito is that at times it seems too simple to be plausible.
9:50
What that really did was it raised the bar for us to validate it.
9:54
But we do think that simplicity now actually becomes a tailwind because it makes it easier for patients and prescribers to kind of understand what's happening.

11 MINS LATER

20:57
You know, is there anybody who stands out in your mind, your memory, any one of these patients when they start their brain lighting up?
0:34
So why don't we kick it off with that, Christian?
0:36
Yeah, so Cognito is a fascinating story.
0:38
So we're a neurotechnologies company that is really pioneering an entirely new type of therapy.
0:45
And so what we're using is we're using sensory stimulation to drive activity in the brain that... generates endogenous biology that is incredibly important to preserving brain structure and brain function.
0:58
And so the way that the therapy works is we use sensory stimulation, light, sound, even touch, to drive a persistent and consistent activity level in the brain.
1:11
And then when the brain is at that activity level...
1:14
It prompts biology that is incredibly important to things like synaptic resilience and myelin production and reducing neuroinflammation.

7 MINS LATER

8:35
Well,
153:16
Mm-hmm.
153:17
And that when the brain is at a particular activity rate, um, that they call the gamma bran- uh, gamma band, when the neurons are firing north of 40, uh, hertz per second, then what you see is you see this sort of profound biology that is driven, that helps drive synapses and myelin and, and really preserve brain structure and brain function.
153:38
And they then learned that you could, you could use an external stimulation to drive that level of activity, and actually if you stimulated the visual and the auditory cortices, that would give you the most profound sort of response.

7 MINS LATER

160:34
Yeah.
160:34
'Cause I get to see this really interesting science get delivered to families that need it desperately.
160:40
And, and as much as I'd love for your story to be, you know, unique, and it's unique for you guys, uh, there's not a day that I don't run into people that say, you know, "My mom," or "My dad," or "My aunt," or "My uncle," or...
160:51
And so it's just, it's just such a desperate need.
160:53
I can't...

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