Mind Meets Machine is a video podcast by Avik where mental health, AI, and business collide in the most human way. Real conversations with founders, therapists, doctors, and creators. Practical tools, clear insights, and zero fluff. Learn to think clearer, work smarter, and live better in a tech-driven world.
Forgetting can feel random, but the science of sleep suggests it is often conditional. After you study, your brain does a huge amount of memory consolidation work overnight, and small changes in your environment can influence what gets strengthened and what fades. We dig into targeted memory reactivation, a research-backed approach that uses a specific cue, usually a scent and sometimes a sound, to nudge the sleeping brain to replay what you learned earlier.
We talk with Brandon Christian, the founder manufacturing Remory in Toronto, about what it takes to turn a decade-plus of neuroscience and sleep research into an actual bedside device. He breaks down the biggest misconception right away: you cannot learn brand-new facts while you sleep. What you can do is reinforce material you already studied by pairing it with a unique smell, then reintroducing that same cue during the right sleep stages, without waking yourself up. We also get honest about the evidence: why some studies fail to replicate, how variables like volume, sleep disruption, age, and timing can flip results, and what a realistic improvement might look like for exams when you use TMR consistently.
Then we get practical and physical. Brandon walks through the user experience, how wearables like Apple Watch, Oura, Fitbit, and Whoop can help time cues, and why the “boring” engineering details matter most, from scent chemistry to leakage-proof enclosures to moving beyond breadboards into manufacturable electronics. If you care about sleep, learning, study habits, memory recall, or building science-based products, this conversation gives you both the promise and the guardrails.
Subscribe for more grounded conversations like this, share the episode with someone who is studying right now, and leave a review if it helps. What would you try first: a scent cue for language learning, a cue for exam prep, or a cue tied to a meaningful life moment?
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You spend hours learning something new, pouring attention into it, and then you sleep. And some of it just disappears. But what if the right smell, the right sound played back while you dream? You could pull those memories forward and lock them in place. Not a science fiction, not a productivity hack. Just a strange quiet truth about how consolidation actually works and why almost no one has turned it into something you can hold in your hand.
And today we are speaking with a very lovely guest. Please welcome Brandon Christian. So welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, thank you so much. It's good to be on here. And yeah, I'm very excited to kind of tell your listeners and yourself about this whole world of science that sounds science fiction, but uh it's actually not crazy science fiction. It's it's rooted in a lot of reality.
SPEAKER_00
Very true, very true. And I'm really, very curious to have our conversation on this. But before that, uh dear listeners, uh, I'll quickly introduce you with Braddon. So he manufactures a device in Toronto that releases scent. Yes. That releases scent and sound during sleep to strengthen the memory. Interesting, right? So build on research that goes back almost two decades and motivated by something deeply personal. So I definitely want to I do not want to take much of a time. Let's get started.
So Brandon, like I mean, you know, like most people they assume that memory consolidation during sleep is either automatic or out of our hands entirely. And so because nowadays there are a lot of apps also they help you uh also check like how you're responding, how you're uh doing while you are sleeping in the morning and you get to uh get to learn. But what is the misconception here that keeps this area of research so misunderstood? And at the same time, if you can share like what does targeted memory reactivation actually mean when you strip away the neuroscience jargon.
SPEAKER_01
So if you yeah, yeah, there's a lot of misconceptions in the field, and I mean the concept of learning while you sleep has probably been around for a million years, and you you I'll say that I'll be the first to say this: you can't do that. You can't learn new information while you sleep. That's not how your brain works. It needs to be information that you have studied or you have already tried to really consolidate. There are, you know, for example, what targeted memory activation, many ways you can do it, many ways you can do this, but the best way is you first deliver a scent cue while you're studying something. That could be simply as studying biology of a frog, or it could be a really um, you know, uh a great event like a wedding or an anniversary, an audio or a scent cue that is so unique to that situation. Then you re-deliver those scent cues, and if you want an extra boost, audio of the thing you're trying to remember. So um, you know, biology of a frog during very specific sleep phases. Now, those sleep phases, each person reacts slightly differently to the some people react better to deep sleep, some people will react better to light sleep and rem, and that's sort of where my product comes into play, and we figure out the best for you. And then again, the best way to be able to remember those things on demand is by resmelling that scent cue. So maybe it's cinnamon with your biology notes, cinnamon during a specific sleep phase, and then a scent of cinnamon when you want to remember that specifically in an exam. And that's yeah, that's what uh Remory uh is, and that's what we've built.
Exactly. I mean it's so when you when you first came across this research while uh trying to help your grandmother, so what was the moment you realized that this was not just a theory, but something this uh I mean that could uh translate into real intervention?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah. So I'll I'll I'll it's a it's a it's a semi-long story, but I'll I'll make it short. Like you alluded to, my grandmother, she had a fall and her memory was affected. And that's when I I just wanted to help her. You know, I just wanted to do anything I could to help her help her remember take her medications. And that's when I came across targeted memory reactivation. Now, I came across maybe two or three studies in the field. Specifically, there's a very famous study, Raish in 2007 in in the journal Science, and he did this back 20 years ago and found amazing improvements in what students could recall. Now, I I didn't make a great initial first product. It was a bad initial MVP, and I shelved it actually. But then my little sister, she's in university, she failed an exam. She came to me and she was like, Brandon, can I can I try that thing that you built for grandma? Because I don't want to fill my exams again. So I re I remade it for her and I dived deeper into the science. And that's when I started uncovering studies like Cousins 2014 in the journal neuroscience, Vidal, 2022 in Scientific Reports, Newman 2020 in Scientific Reports again. There's over 50 research articles in this area of research, and 25 very clearly show what to do if you want to get these memory improvements. And that's what I've built the product up under. And I seems like honestly, every month I encounter two or three more studies that I didn't find before, and it's only just bolstering the area of research, making it more and more clear that this is something that no one has built in and that we definitely should be building in.
SPEAKER_00
So I mean obviously it's it's rare to find someone willing to admit that science is not settled, that some studies showed nothing, and others barely moved the next year. So the the that honesty matters, obviously. So yeah.
So and also like you have read dozens of studies now, including five that found nothing at all, and twelve that kind of came out, which is mixed. So what pattern or maybe the deeper limitation keeps showing up across this body of work? Like what does that tell you about why technology ha has also reached people's uh bedrooms here?
SPEAKER_01
I'll give you a great example of one specific study, and then I'll tell you the overarching pattern. There's a study, Whitmore, uh, 2022, in the Journal of Sleep Research. They did targeted memory reactivation, they did audio specifically, no scent. And the 60 or so people, average returns or average improvement, zero. Flat, no improvement. And they couldn't figure out why. The body of research says it should be improving, and they concluded the research and said, you know what? Hey, something's not working and this doesn't work. But then they realized one thing. They noticed many of the people in the study were waking up while they were sleeping. So they turned down the dial of the volume on the audio cues that were being delivered during, I believe that one was in deep sleep. They turned it down a lot quieter, redid the study, that's when they found that it improved. So the people in the second study with a much quieter audio had a very large improvement in what they could remember. They could remember about, I believe they only had 15% in failure rate, and the control group, or sorry, yeah, the control group had a 31% failure rate. So that's obviously a big, big improvement there. Now the overarching research does show very similarities to that. It's it's audio of the cues, making sure that you're not waking up. It is which sleep phases they're being delivered in. So if you are an older person, there's certain sleep phases are better for you to deliver that cue to. And then if you're younger, you know, the effects of light sleep and REM sleep are more impactful for you for you. And it really depends on your age, your the amount of hours you get of sleep per night, the amount of kind of you know, sent cues that are delivered throughout the night, and about about 31 different variables that we identify at Remory that we figure out what works best for each person.
And I mean, the most cited results in this area uh failed to kind of replicate in 2019, which I I also just checked. So, how did that failure shape the way you think about what your device can and cannot promise?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point. There's a lot of things that I very much don't promise. You know, you're not going to, if if you are getting call it a 50% on an exam on your test results, you're not going to suddenly magically become a 90%. You're not going to, you know, overnight. But based on targeted memory reactivation, the research, the common threads, the patterns, you will get a depending on how many days you do this for, that is very clear that the longer you do this, the better the effects. You could get a five, a six, an eight-point improvement, maybe even as high as a ten-point improvement in your test results, depending on the type of test, and again, depending on how long you do this for. So that's kind of what I shape the general zone. If you're in an exam where three, five, seven-point improvement on your exam is a huge impact, we're probably for you. But if you are in an exam where you're very far from the cutoff, you are you know very below, you might want to embrace more traditional studying routes, like maybe a Duolingo or study guides or or ankey, like those kinds of things. The benefit though, that I will say, is that our product fits on top of those. We never really say we we you can still do those things, you can still do ankey, you can still do flashcards. We just use our product on top of that. We never really replace any of them.
SPEAKER_00
And uh so I mean this is something grounding in a way that you kind of uh hold both the sides of the evidence at once. So it would be easier to ferry pick the wins, but you seem you seem more interested in what is true than what is kind of convenient. So yeah. Yeah, you're saying something, please.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. The one other thing that you know you you brought up earlier that I would also add is in version one or cohort one of the product, I'll be the first to admit it was a pretty dumb device. It was there was no scientific, you know, backing. It was uh an MVP, if you will. And that one had cues throughout the entire night. So it was just a dummy device every five minutes or set seven minutes, it would re-deliver the audio and the send cues. And when then I eventually found some research in 2011 by a researcher named Donahue. They found that that type of research, when you deliver it consistently throughout the night on just like a dummy device, that's actually not good. So that is why I changed the product to you know be more specific when it's delivering something. So while I do suggest users, if they hear what I'm building or they hear the area of targeted memory reactivation, I do suggest, you know, light up, put a diffuser in the wall, check if it's conducive to your environment, see if you like a little scent in the air. It's probably not gonna help you, but at least it's that initial kind of bridge to see if it would be good for your environment in general. It's just that the research unfortunately says that consistent five-minute or seven-minute or ten-minute intervals is not enough.
So right now, if we can talk about our daily life, right? So for someone using a device like this, so then what does the experience actually look like? Like what does the scent get released? How does the sound play, and what small everyday change might someone notice after a week or a month using it?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I'll give you one example of a student I'm thinking of that's using the product right now. So they, I believe they're studying biology. This isn't my sister, this is someone else. I believe they're studying biology, and they take the device and they open it when they're studying. And the device is a little bit of a dummy when it's during the day because that's not highly important. It delivers, there's a little fan in there, microcontroller, and it just delivers every few minutes a big whiff of they I believe they have the I believe they have one that is called, I believe it's cinnamon. That's that's the scent that this person has. Then when they're done a study session, probably about 30 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour, they go throughout their entire day, and then when they are ready to sleep, they position the device right beside their bedside table. The device is maybe about the size of a small computer mouse or maybe about half the size of a foam, and they open the device. There's a little drawer. The device starts talking to a health wearable. If you've got an Apple Watch or an Aura or a Fitbit or a Whoop, those kinds of things, they are the meat and potatoes to determine when you're in sleep phases. And then my device hooks into that data to Yeah, it doesn't actually collect the data itself. It connects into their servers. Because these are multi-billion dollar companies, they've figured out the best ways to find sleep phases, and I might as well hook into that to you know deliver the best product I can. Then, yeah, it the product simply turns on a fan or uh they press play on their phone right now, and that's the audio side. So those two in tandem, the device releasing scent cues, the phone releasing audio cues during the phases of sleep that we have determined. Now, if you're a new user, it's gonna maybe take a day or two or three to really calibrate what works best. But after that, your you know, your your your goal and the product has kind of tuned into what works best for you. And then this individual that I'm thinking of, they've did it for at least four or five days. And again, this is self-reported, but they did report an improvement in their memory for their upcoming test. I recommend that you use this a week or a week and a half or two weeks before a major exam, simply so that it's still fresh in your mind. If you're studying three weeks out, four weeks out, and you have a long period of time where you don't re-study that material, it's probably gonna slightly drift, and you're probably gonna start to forget it. It is that fresh span of a week or a week and a half that really has the best benefits.
it. And like also you mentioned that a fragrance problem that took months to solve. So, what was breaking? Like, I mean, like, what did you learn about that gap between working prototype and something reliable enough to sell?
SPEAKER_01
Oh man, there is uh almost an infinite amount of stories there, but specifically the scent side, yes, has been very difficult. And that's because in my experience, I'm gonna maybe simplify this a little bit, but I first started out with aroma chemicals. Now, aroma chemicals are the things that are inside like colognes or perfumes, and everyone knows them, you spray it on, and you're you're able to smell it for about eight hours, which in theory sounds great. It's very strong, and that eight hours is very strong. But my product right now, a refill, should last about two weeks. So, in all of my testing, literally after a single night, no one could smell the product anymore, which is terrible for something you're supposed to be used for two weeks, but yet aroma chemicals essentially start to deviate and and kind of go away after about eight hours. So then I found uh essential oils, again, very something that everyone knows about. You know, maybe you've got thyme or you've maybe got some form of lemon essential oil. And those can last longer than eight hours. And in my testing, I don't know, there was there were many that lasted 40 hours or so, 50 hours or so, several nights, but they're really not strong at all. No one ever says, wow, that's a very pungent um, you know, essential oil. So then I found a new area of you know fragrance, and it's called fragrance oils. And these are a mix of the best of both worlds. These last very long, and then they also are very pungent. So I did a lot of testing, a dozen, two dozen different formulas, and then I eventually landed on the ones that are you know I my users have today. But it took a while because you'd think that there is you know, these these chemicals are all the same thing that oh, there's no difference between a fragrance oil or an aroma chemical or an essential oil, but in reality they have massive differences between them all.
SPEAKER_00
So um building hardware with no background and and it one of those gaps people do not talk about enough, but you can break all the research and uh believe in the science and still spend months on an enclosure that does not leak. So yeah.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that's exactly it. There so I although my background is more of a traditional finance background, a period of time was at a a big hardware startup in Toronto, and I I was very much involved in the the grant side of that company, procured about 30 million in grants, and so I was incredibly involved on the hardware, the firmware, the electronics and stuff like that. That's where I got enough skills, I would say, to be able to build something like this. It was actually a 3D printing manufacturing startup, and one of the biggest skill transference was building the MVP via 3D printing. Now, 3D printing is not necessarily the best long-term solution for manufacturing. You definitely do need to find something more professional and something that's more built for manufacturing, but it is great at making an initial product. Leakage of the scent was one of the biggest things as well because it depends on the material you use when you're 3D printing, because some of them leak scent. PLA is a great example of that. If you're using PLA in 3D printing, it's not meant it's very, very much not meant for manufacturing, and it's very much very much not meant for parts that should last a long time. Now, PET G is a variant of 3D printing material, and that one is a lot better. That one is definitely meant for contact with oils like the ones I'm using, and the leakage is not that much because the layers are so tight. So that was one of the biggest findings I found is you gotta know the material you're working with, especially if you're working with manufacturing of a hardware item.
if you also talk about like building something this specific, right? This grounded in Nissan is that half the time does not replicate, and you must hit walls that make you question whether it is worth continuing. So, how did you handle those setbacks? Like, what keeps you manufacturing units in Toronto when the easier path would have been to walk away?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, that's I mean, setbacks happen pretty much every day.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
A great example is the microcontroller that's inside the device. Now, I there's several stages if you're building something like this, and specifically for the microcontroller or the or the brains, if you will, of the device. And so the first one I did, as traditionally one would do, is on a breadboard. You know, I'm not sure if you're familiar, but you kind of just pop wires in. It's definitely not something you can ever put sell or put in somewhere.
SPEAKER_00
Circuit board kind of thing, right?
SPEAKER_01
Exactly, yeah.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
And it's great initial proof that the thing you're trying to build can theoretically be built. But the first wall is going from that breadboard, circuit board kind of thing, to then an actual so soldered prototype. And that was a massive wall I hit, not because soldering is inherently difficult, but because the amount of parts that I needed to solder, the amount of soldered joints and this the sandwich. I essentially had two boards that needed to be sandwiched and then soldering between the two, which can be quite difficult. And that stopped me for a while, maybe about a week, maybe two weeks, maybe even three weeks or so, until I finally said, you know what, I'm going to jump over this step and go completely to step three, which is designing a board from scratch, where you don't solder much. There are many companies out there like JLPLC, I think it's JLPCB. And as long as you know the board design softwares and you know how to build a board, you can essentially jump over that second step, which is like soldering it yourself and soldering the components. And you instead, you you you design a board from scratch, but then you get a company like JLPLCB to manufacture it for you. They do all the soldering, they skip that. And that was sort of you know one of the biggest things that sort of unlocked actually scaling this and actually putting this in front of dozens of people. Because when you're soldering something yourself and you're selling something around the price that I do, it's just not feasible to make a hundred copies yourself. Now the biggest, you know, more of a mental barrier during that time when you're hitting those walls is to honestly just take a take a day off. Just clear your head, do something that's outside of the things you normally Wouldn't do. Maybe that means go for a hike. Maybe that means do something uncomfortable, like go to a concert of a genre you've never been to. Just really get yourself out of your own head because when you do that, you're probably going to realize that there's a shortcut to what you're trying to do, or there's a way to skip some things and get to the end result faster.
Awesome. And so if you have to give one advice to the listeners today who are listening right now, maybe they'll they'll be listening later, what that could be.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I would say probably my biggest piece of advice depends on the field you're building in and if you are building something. So if you're someone who has an interesting idea and you're in that beginning stage of do I work on this, do I not work on this? Honestly, short answer, yes, work on this. We live in a day and age where you can immediately get all the information you could possibly need to build maybe even the smallest amount of an MVP. Maybe that's through asking for AI assistance through ChatGPT or Claude, or maybe that's just through watching YouTube videos. There is very little barriers today to build the initial MVP of something. So I would definitely recommend your listeners to do that and you know, through the use of Claude or through the use of ChatGPT to at least get in the initial kind of exposure to that information. And if you are currently building something, the biggest piece of advice I would have is try to get advisors. Try to get people in your network to get advice from who are experts in their domain. Because if you're building something alone or you've got one partner, you're not, you you don't have enough time to become the expert in every single domain. So lean on the people in your network, lean on the people of your colleagues, your ex-colleagues, your friends, your family who are the experts in those areas so that you can leapfrog what would normally take someone a month, five months, twelve months. Instead, you can get to that solution faster by leaning on that.
SPEAKER_00
Exactly. And if listeners want to connect with you, how can they connect?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so my email is brandon at remory.ca. That's r-em-o-r-y.ca. And the website, of course, is remory.ca. Please feel free to reach out, send an email if you have any thoughts or any advice. I currently live in downtown Toronto, very close with the startup ecosystem in Toronto, but also a little bit kind of all in North America. So if anyone is wanting advice on, hey, you know, how to raise a pre-seed or how to get more exposure to areas in the startup ecosystem, or they're just you know wanting to exp they want to get advice on a specific topic that they're trying to work on or a specific solution. Feel free to reach out to me. Uh, you know, I'm available pretty much all day, every day, as with most entrepreneurs are. But yeah, yeah, feel free to reach out.
So, dear listeners, what I'll do is I'll put all the links, details, everything into the show notes for easy reference. And I'll just say, like, you know, like memory. Memory does not get kind of stronger by accident. It gets stronger with the conditions are right, when the cues come back, and when someone cares enough to build the thing that no one else. So thank you so much, Brandon, for sharing your perspectives, your expertise, and what you have built that is really gonna help people. And thank you everyone for listening. Maybe today before or tonight before you sleep. Notice what sounds and smells are in the room. Notice like what uh you studied today, what you want to remember tomorrow. That line between learning and forgetting is thinner than we think. So and and sometimes all it takes is someone to willing to build that bridge. So with this, this is your whole survey, and this is my next machine. I'll assume the next one.
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