The Future of Sleep? How Bia Neuroscience Is Transforming Rest

Discover how Bia Neuroscience is revolutionizing the way we rest! In this episode of the CTRL+Listen podcast, host James sits down with Michael Byrne, co-founder and CEO of Bia Neuroscience, to discuss groundbreaking advancements in sleep technology.

What you’ll learn:

• How Bia’s smart sleep mask uses neurofeedback for optimal rest.
• The science behind sleep tech and its impact on brain health.
• Why personalization is the future of sleep optimization.

Join the conversation as we explore how technology is reshaping sleep and paving the way for better health and productivity. Don’t miss this deep dive into the world of neurotech!

Resources from this episode:

• Learn about Bia Neuroscience
• Follow Michael on LinkedIn

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Transcript

James: Hi everyone, this is James from the CTRL+Listen Podcast, brought to you by Octopart. Today we have guest Michael Byrne. He is the co-founder and CEO of Bia, also known as Bia Neuroscience. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Glad to have you here.

Michael: Very excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

James: Anytime. What you guys do is really interesting. I'm excited to get into that. Before we start down that path, do you want to tell us a little bit about the company, your journey with it, and where it's heading?

Michael: Sure. I'm one of the co-founders. My other co-founder, Andrew, and I met at a sleep supplement company. Our background is in the sleep space. Before that, I worked in the neurotech space.

At the sleep company, it was a sleep aid — basically a melatonin mix. Because of the low price, we saw over a million customers. We got to contact and communicate with them about the sleep space in great depth and learned a lot hands-on about what people were struggling with and what worked for them.

From that, we realized there really wasn't a great solution in the sleep space. I wanted to get back into neurotech. We originally looked at cognitive enhancement.

Just to be super clear, when I say neurotech, I'm talking about technology for the nervous system, almost always the brain. We first looked at cognitive enhancement, something to boost memory. There are a handful of techniques out there, but many involve sending a direct current into the brain. It’s very mild, nothing dangerous, but it still freaked people out.

When we started surveying customers — thousands of them — and doing product discovery, we looked at which companies were succeeding or failing in that space. We gathered all that feedback, tested, and iterated over and over again for a couple of years.

Eventually, we ended right back in the sleep space. When we asked, “What is the most viable way to improve people's cognitive abilities and brain health in a way that is comfortable, acceptable, and harmless?” we landed back on sleep and on neurofeedback.

I'm a certified neurofeedback technician. That’s what I did before the sleep company. So now we're 100% focused on sleep with neurotech. That’s all we do. We’re just trying to nail sleep and get it as optimized as we possibly can.

James: That's exciting. Have you found there's still a bit of stigma in the public around anything that interacts with the brain?

Michael: Yes. For many people, there are still mental blockers around the comfort level of influencing the brain. A lot of that will change with time and education.

For example, neurofeedback is more or less coaching. It’s a bit like learning how to tie your shoes, except your brain is getting direct feedback itself rather than you consciously going through a series of steps. We’re skipping a few steps and letting the brain learn directly.

It’s a completely harmless process. Changing your brain is normal — listening to this podcast and learning something is changing your brain. The brain is constantly changing and adapting. As people learn that, and get used to the idea, it’ll become much more commonplace.

James: Great. I guess there’s a big spectrum there, because you have things like Neuralink, which directly impacts the physical brain, versus something like this where you're retraining.

Michael: Exactly. There's non-invasive and invasive tech, and even some that work more on the peripheral nervous system, further away from the brain, to help train and make changes.

The invasive tech is definitely still more alarming, but people are getting more accustomed to it as brain surgery and related tech advance.

James: Yeah. I mean, if you look back a few decades in medicine, the idea of a heart transplant was absolutely crazy. Now nobody really questions it, aside from some religious objections.

Michael: Exactly. The brain is next on the agenda, I guess.

James: I think so. Let’s take a step back. What exactly is sleep tech?

Michael: In the simplest terms: technology to enhance sleep.

That can sound like an oxymoron, but it can be as simple as blackout blinds — that technically counts as sleep tech — or cooling bedding. It doesn’t have to be electronic.

However, the trend is moving strongly toward electronic solutions. Electronics have also negatively impacted sleep, but I don't think anyone is giving up their phone or the internet. For many of us, being connected is a requirement to live and work.

So the goal is to develop tech that actually helps sleep and supports it, rather than harming it.

James: Interesting. And things like a white noise generator would fall under that category too, right?

Michael: Exactly. A lot of these products have emerged because of the broad advancements in technology. At the same time, sleep has been trending downward for a long time.

The stat that always blows my mind is this: in 1942, during World War II, about 11% of people slept six hours or less. In 2013, 40% of people — four zero — sleep six hours or less. It has gotten almost four times worse than during World War II.

James: I was a history major originally, and I remember seeing that the biggest change to sleep patterns in recent history was electricity. Before that, people were limited by the light they could generate at home, so they went to bed and woke up early to be efficient.

Michael: Yes.

James: That's not the case anymore. And the internet has been another huge factor. People used to go home, do their evening routine, and go to bed. Now you have full access to the entire world from your home.

Michael: Yeah. There's nothing preventing you from accessing almost anything you want to know, do, or experience with a few clicks.

James: That’s dangerous. Keeps you up all night.

Michael: Or you can go the opposite way and just numb out doom-scrolling social media for four hours when you could be sleeping.

James: Exactly. Partial sleep instead of quality sleep. I won’t stay on that too long because I want to talk more about your primary product: the smart sleep mask, right?

Michael: Yes. I can talk for hours about this, but I’ll try to keep it straightforward.

At a high level, our mask is measuring, improving, and optimizing. Those are the three big categories. We’re working on a closed-loop system. Based on what we measure, we change what information we send back through audio or light to optimize what happens next.

So it becomes a feedback loop. We measure, see what’s going on — maybe your brain is racing, thinking about a meeting tomorrow — and we play audio that’s more relaxing and calming.

We look at how that changes your brain activity. If you’re starting to relax, then we push you a bit further into that state. Next we help you reach the first stage of sleep, then guide you through sleep cycles.

As your alarm time approaches — say, in an hour — we start pulling you out of deep sleep toward a lighter sleep, and then toward wakefulness.

Measure what's happening, improve by adapting to it, and then optimize across nights. It learns every time you use the mask. So it gets better with each use.

We also give you ways to track and feed information back so we can personalize the experience. If you need eight and a half hours and three hours of deep sleep to feel perfect, and I need nine hours and one hour and thirteen minutes of deep sleep, it will learn that over time.

James: Interesting. And every single person is different. Everyone sleeps a different amount and sleeps differently.

Michael: Exactly. It's a highly personalized experience. You’ll often hear “eight hours” as the rule, and that's the peak of a normal distribution curve. More precisely, most people need about seven and a half hours of actual sleep and around eight hours in bed, allowing 30 minutes to fall asleep.

But some people — it's rare — genuinely need less than six hours.

James: That's me.

Michael: It’s not common, but some people operate perfectly fine on that. They wake up naturally after six hours. Others need nine or ten, and that’s what their body truly requires. It’s just the normal distribution curve.

Within that, the cycles and patterns are personalized too. How much time each person needs in each stage of sleep, and how they move through the four stages, varies.

Stage one: you feel like you’re awake, but you’re technically asleep.
Stage two: still light sleep, but deeper.
Stage three: deep sleep.
Stage four: REM, where most dreaming happens.

How much time you need in each stage, how you transition — that’s constantly changing, and personal.

James: Wow, that's very adaptive. I’ll use myself as a little case study. I cannot sleep on planes. I find it almost impossible.

So, if I'm someone who needs about six hours of sleep and I'm on a 12–13 hour flight, when would I engage the sleep mask, and how would that work?

Michael: The way the mask works, experience-wise, is this:

You connect it to your phone. Say you want to sleep for six hours — you set “wake me in six hours.” You put on the mask.

Depending on your preference, we can have Bluetooth shut off, or you can stream your own music.

A sunset starts in the mask. We have an artificial sunset built with optical engineers to mimic a real sunset. That cues your body that it’s bedtime — time to wind down.

Then the audio starts playing.

On a long flight, there isn't a single “optimal” time to start; it’s about when you want to sleep. If you want to watch a movie first, do that. If you want to sleep right away, you can. Technically, you should listen to the safety briefing first.

It’s very flexible — you choose when.

James: Very adaptable. That’s great. To understand how it works better, we should probably talk about what neurofeedback actually is.

Michael: Sure. I’ll start with the sensor suite in the mask. We have:

• A binaural microphone: picks up sound levels and patterns — disturbances, breathing rate, etc. This helps with sleep staging.

• An infrared temperature sensor on the forehead: completely contactless, for skin temperature. A lot of smart rings and watches also use temperature as a sleep signal.

• A movement sensor (IMU and gyroscope): gives us head position and movement, which also helps detect sleep stages.

• Our big one: an fNIRS system — functional near-infrared spectroscopy.

fNIRS uses infrared light, which reflects off red blood cells. The reflection changes based on the oxygenation level in those cells.

When parts of the brain are active, they consume more oxygen. Less active areas consume less. So fNIRS measures oxygen consumption and gives us a map of brain activity.

This tech has been around 30–40 years in labs. Historically it was big, expensive, and very technical. With recent advancements, we can now take it out of the lab and put it into consumer devices.

All of this correlates well with sleep stages and mental states, so we can see what’s happening in the brain.

That’s how we measure brain activity.

Neurofeedback is what we do with that measurement.

You put on the mask, and the audio starts. We see, for example, that your mind is racing about a meeting tomorrow. We play more relaxing audio and layer a secondary track designed to provide encouragement or discouragement.

That secondary track tells your brain, “You’re going in the right direction” or “You’re going in the wrong direction.” When you drift toward a relaxed state, you get a form of reward in the sound. When your brain ramps back up into stress, the sound changes in a way the brain doesn’t “like.”

Over time, your brain learns: this pattern is good, that one is bad. It starts to chase the good one on its own. It’s operant conditioning applied to your brain activity.

After you do this a number of times, your brain recognizes the sound patterns and adapts faster: “Oh, I know what to do here.” That helps you fall asleep faster, stay asleep, and move more efficiently through sleep stages.

James: Interesting. Do you have to keep using the device forever to maintain that, or can you stop and your brain will remember?

Michael: You’ll always be better off using it than not, but your brain does learn and retain benefits.

There’s also the association aspect. The mask becomes a portable sleep environment. A lot of pilots travel with their own pillow because they’re always in a new hotel. People often sleep worse the first night in a hotel, even if it’s a better bed. It’s because it’s unfamiliar.

With our mask, you get a familiar sleep environment — the same audio, the same light — wherever you are.

As for neurofeedback, the learning is long-term. It’s similar to how you learn to tie your shoes.

The first time you tied your shoes as a kid, all your muscles could have moved in different ways. You weren’t very good at it. As you practiced, your brain built specific neural pathways for tying shoes. The more you used those pathways, the stronger they became, until tying shoes became second nature.

If someone showed you a completely different way to tie shoes using different fingers, you’d be terrible at it at first. Your brain has a “highway” for the usual way and a rough dirt path for the new way.

For many people, their current “highway” is poor sleep — trouble falling asleep, waking frequently, racing thoughts. We’re using neurofeedback to build a new highway: a pattern that leads to consistent, deep, restorative sleep.

The more you use it, the stronger that new pathway becomes. Eventually, even without the mask, you're better at reaching that healthy pattern than you were before.

James: Wow. I have a slightly practical question. Is it one device per household or one per user?

Michael: We strongly recommend one per person because of the personalization and learning we just talked about.

We have the measure–improve–optimize loop, and the “optimize” part relies on your individual data. We connect with Apple Health, Google Health, etc., to see when you exercised, when you ate, and other context that helps us personalize.

Because of that, we suggest one per person.

That said, we plan to add a “guest mode” so someone can try it briefly without overwriting your long-term personalization.

We also plan a partner feature so couples can see how their sleep affects each other and how to support each other’s sleep.

James: Oh wow, that’s interesting. I also saw on your site that you have an alarm system that wakes you when you need to be woken, using something called bone conduction audio.

Michael: Yes. The wake-up side has several parts.

First, the neural audio: when your alarm time approaches — say 8:00 AM — we start pulling you out of deep sleep and guiding you toward an awake, focused state. The audio at that point mimics a focused mindset, so your brain moves toward feeling alert.

Second, the sunrise in the mask. Instead of a loud beeping alarm on your nightstand, you wake up to gentle audio and light. The sunrise effect is color-tuned and gradual. It’s a much more pleasant way to wake up.

We also have plans for affirmations and an auto-meditate function. After we detect that you’re awake, we can drop you into a short meditation. You’re supposed to get about 10 minutes of sunlight in the morning. We can simulate that with the mask while you lie in bed and meditate, without moving a muscle.

Bone conduction is our method of delivering the audio.

Regular earbuds produce sound waves that travel through air, go in your ear canal, vibrate the eardrum, then tiny bones, and eventually stimulate neurons in the inner ear.

Bone conduction skips the air part. It vibrates bone directly in a pattern that your auditory system interprets as sound.

From your perspective, you still “hear” the music normally. But it’s silent to anyone next to you unless they’re physically touching the device, because the sound travels through contact, not air.

An unexpected benefit of our design is that the electronics sit between two layers of foam. The inner layer acts like a surround-sound surface, so you feel and hear the sound moving around your head. It's incredibly soothing and relaxing.

James: That’s really cool — exciting tech. I’ve seen a bit of bone conduction in headphones, but not much. Obviously this is groundbreaking and there’s a lot of research still to come. How much room do you see for growth in this area?

Michael: A huge amount.

Sleep tech itself is booming — close to 20% year-over-year growth. It’s growing incredibly quickly.

Sleep is becoming a well-understood trend. For a long time, people treated sleep as the enemy — “sleep is the cousin of death,” that kind of mindset. Now people are realizing how vital it is to performance.

Athletes talk about it constantly as their main “hack” to be at their best. It’s becoming obvious how crucial sleep is.

I think sleep tech growth will accelerate even more.

I often compare it to exercise. We used to get enough physical activity naturally through daily life. Then we moved into factories and offices, and now most of us have to be intentional about exercise.

Sleep used to “just happen.” With electricity and screens everywhere, we now have to be intentional about sleep too. I think the cultural shift toward intentional sleep is just beginning, so the opportunity is huge.

James: I definitely agree. And in the medical space, what we’re learning about sleep is mind-blowing. I’ve seen studies showing direct correlations between dementia or Alzheimer’s and lack of sleep — real causality.

Michael: Yes. There are a lot of findings there. We’re not a medical device, so we’re not curing, treating, or diagnosing, but the research is fascinating.

We’ve talked to quite a few addiction clinics. Sleep is absolutely vital to recovery. It can dramatically change the likelihood of relapse.

James: That’s crazy. I’ll have to look that up. This might be a silly question, but is there any applicability of this technology outside of sleep?

Michael: Definitely.

There’s another product called Mendi that uses fNIRS as well. Their focus is ADHD. It’s a very different process and method, but we love their product. I use it frequently and strongly recommend it.

In general brain health and cognitive support, the technologies we’re using have a lot of potential applications.

For our mask specifically, we’re also exploring mental support and meditation: meeting preparation, mood setting, relaxing before stressful tasks.

But as a company, we’re trying to stay focused on sleep, especially for people who sleep poorly. We want to be their stable, positive sleep environment, so we don’t want the device used in a hundred different ways.

Technologically, though, there’s a huge range of opportunities wherever the brain is involved. Behavior is heavily driven by the brain, so the overlap is massive.

James: That makes total sense. In the sleep tech space specifically, are there any other trends you’ve seen that you think are exciting or worth paying attention to?

Michael: I’m a big neurotech nerd, so yes.

Focus and attention are big areas. There are headsets like Nerble that work on attention and cognitive performance.

In the medical space, there’s some mind-blowing work. Flow Neuroscience, based in Europe, has a device that is medically proven to help with depression. In many of their studies they outperform medications with zero side effects and no addiction risk. It’s incredible.

So for people dealing with depression, I’d definitely recommend looking into Flow Neuroscience.

James: Fantastic. Do you see this as a way to shift away from medication reliance toward alternatives some people might prefer?

Michael: I think there’s a lot of opportunity there.

For example, ADHD meds versus something like Mendi — I’d personally suggest trying Mendi first before going straight to pharmaceuticals.

Same with depression: there will increasingly be neurotech alternatives.

Anything you currently take a pill for that’s primarily about mental state or mood — if there isn’t already a neurotech option, there probably will be soon.

It’s an exciting field. It’s a sleeping giant. I think neurotech will be a key part of the health revolution in the next 5–10 years.

I also think personalization will be huge. There’s already buzz about “N-of-1” research — personalization of health interventions. That’s where AI and health intersect: making treatments unique to each individual.

James: That was literally my next question: what’s the overlap like between AI and this tech?

Michael: Personalization is the big one.

The other is data quality. Any closed-loop system that measures and responds needs clean, accurate data.

In neurotech, you’ll see AI used heavily to improve data purity: removing noise, interpreting complex signals, and extracting reliable patterns from messy raw data.

We’re also seeing this across medicine in general. AI helps filter, clean, and structure huge datasets so researchers and clinicians can actually use them.

Once you have high-quality data, you can personalize interventions much more effectively. AI makes both of those steps faster.

James: I think it's one of those things that sneaked up on everyone. We all knew AI was coming, and then suddenly it was just here.

Michael: Yes, it’s going to explode. The ability to access information and offload repetitive work is enormous. Tasks that used to take hours, like cleaning a spreadsheet, now take seconds. That accelerates everything on top of it.

James: Someone described it to me as: for a long time we lived in the Age of Information, but the information was just sitting there. We had silos of data everywhere. Now, for the first time, we can break it down into something applicable and useful — and therefore far more valuable.

Michael: Exactly.

We’ve gone from not having access to information and large parts of the world being illiterate, to universal printing, to high literacy, to the internet.

Now we have the opposite problem: too much information. The question becomes, “What is real? What is good information? What can I do with this?”

That’s true at the societal level, and also in medicine and neurotech: we’ve collected tons of brain data, but what does it mean? How much is clean signal and how much is noise from sensor shifts, movement, etc.?

Interpreting that manually is an enormous amount of work. For AI, that’s routine.

James: It also frees people up to do the more creative, problem-solving work instead of menial tasks.

Michael: Exactly.

James: Michael, this has been really interesting. If people want to learn more or keep up to date with the company, where should they go?

Michael: Our website: getbia.com. We have a science page, a “how it works” page, and you can reach out directly. I handle all emails personally. My co-founder handles all comments and social media posts. So if you write in, you’ll get a direct answer from one of us.

On social, Instagram is probably best: @BiaNueuroscience.

We also have an email updates list you can join from the status page on our site. We send production and company updates about every two weeks, so we’re fairly transparent.

James: Awesome. Michael, thank you so much. It’s been absolutely fascinating. I’ve learned a lot about the brain and sleep, and I appreciate your time.

Michael: Thank you so much. I was happy to be on.