GIMBHI's Q&A with Eva Feredoes, Founder of Cogniphy

Eva Feredoes is a cognitive neuroscientist with over 20 years of experience studying how brain measurements relate to human behavior. A Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, she uses non-invasive techniques including focused ultrasound, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and concurrent TMS-fMRI to investigate the neural basis of working memory and attention. She is the founder of Cogniphy (cogniphy.io), where she is building rigorous, science-backed tools for measuring cognition. Eva earned her PhD from the University of New South Wales and has held research positions at University College London, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Reading.

1. How did Cogniphy come to be, and what gap were existing health apps failing to close?

Cogniphy started with a frustration. I’d spent years in research watching genuinely useful findings about the brain and behavior sit in journals, read by a few hundred specialists and almost no one else. The path from a published result to something that changes a real person’s day is long, sometimes a decade or more. Most of it never makes that trip at all.

Then I moved to Silicon Valley and saw the opposite problem solved. Things move fast here, and products that matter reach people quickly, so the contrast was hard to ignore. The science is strong and stuck, but the delivery machine is fast and pointed elsewhere. Cogniphy is my attempt to put the two together, that is, to take what the research already knows and get it into people’s hands without the decade of lag.

The gap I kept seeing in existing apps was on the action side. They’re good at measuring you and showing you a number. They’re not so good at the harder question, which is what you personally should do next.

My research background is in human behavior, and one thing it teaches you is that behavior change is rarely about more information. People usually know what they should do, and instead what they’re missing is an approach that fits who they actually are. That is the gap Cogniphy is built to close – it’s a better measurement of the person, and then a better read on what will actually move that specific person, drawn from science that already exists rather than one invented to sound novel.

2. What’s a “precision predictor,” and how is it different from the scores and rings our devices already give us?

Let’s look at wearables, which many of us are already using and are remarkable pieces of engineering. Getting accurate measurements from a wrist would have seemed impossible a few years ago. But the field has poured its energy into turning those signals into a clean, readable score, and a lot gets lost in that step. Every score is heavily inferred because it takes a complex signal from a specific source and runs it through layers of assumptions and transformations to land on a single number. We’ve become fixated on the number itself, and the part that actually matters, what you do with it, has been left behind.

For example, my ring gives me a lovely picture of how I slept. Then what? How do I turn one number into a different life? The advice that follows is almost always generic: go to bed earlier, wind down before bed. Things I already know, but importantly, things my circumstances often won’t allow.

A precision predictor starts from the other end. We learn something real about the person, such as aspects of their personality and their current state, and use it to build a far more specific picture of who they are and what will actually move them. Take conscientiousness as an example, which is something we can measure. A highly conscientious person tends to do well with structure: 9pm screens off, 10pm last phone check, 11pm hard stop because of an early meeting. A less conscientious person does better with something lighter and in the moment, like a spontaneous message at around 9pm to put the phone down and wrap up in half an hour. Same goal, different route, chosen to fit the individual. The richer our understanding of someone, the better we can predict which interactions will help them change, and help healthier actions become second nature. That is what Cogniphy is built to do.

3. Your research is in non-invasive neuromodulation, including TMS and TMS-fMRI. How does that shape the way you measure health in the real world, where nobody has an fMRI scanner at home?

You’re right that none of that equipment travels home with anyone! What my research background brings is the way it has trained me to think. My research looks at brain networks during cognition, using non-invasive stimulation to probe how those networks let us stay focused and tune out distraction. The day-to-day of that is integrating messy, diverse data from the brain and from behavior into a single coherent picture. The transferable skill is knowing the complexity of real health, which doesn’t sit in one system. This is strongly backed by evidence which keeps showing how tightly the body’s systems talk to each other, so mental health shapes physical health, and the reverse holds too. Improving one part means treating the person as a whole, and my background is built for making those connections across body and behavior. And as a neuroscientist, I’ll admit a bias toward the brain as one of the more important pieces to get right.

4. What are we most missing in the health and longevity conversation right now?

The body is smarter than the hacking conversation gives it credit for. It has spent a very long time tuning its processes toward what works, which is exactly why shortcuts rarely hold. Those large studies I mentioned confirm something fairly unglamorous: health comes from several actions together, and most of them are things we already know: move regularly, stay social, eat better, sleep.

None of it is thrilling, but it doesn’t have to feel like a chore either. For people who already do these things, they aren’t burdens. They’re simply part of life, part of who they are, and they ask for very little effort or attention. Hacks and shortcuts are the opposite: high effort, high attention, and they just don’t last. So the conversation I’d like to see is less about clever ways to beat the system and more about getting the things that work woven into ordinary days, until they hold on their own. The body is too smart for the shortcuts anyway.

5. What do you want people to know about Cogniphy, and how can they get involved?

We’re building the foundation of Cogniphy right now, and we would love people to use it and show us what’s working and what isn’t.

This is for anyone who has tried to change something about their life and found it didn’t stick. Maybe you’ve started and stopped a fitness routine more times than you’d like to count, or you want to bring a bit more movement and mental wellbeing into ordinary days without overhauling everything at once. It’s also for the people who are simply curious and want to learn something real about themselves: how they tick, what tends to work for them, and why some approaches do work while others slide off. If any of that sounds like you, you’re exactly who we’re hoping to hear from.

If you’d like to be part of it, email us at info@cogniphy.io, and have a look at cogniphy.io for more about our mission.