This content is about NUU Cognition

NUU Cognition is an ambitious startup that aims to fundamentally transform how humans think and process information through innovative software tools and artificial intelligence. At its core, the company is building what they call "thinking technologies" – tools that augment human cognition rather than replace it, addressing a critical concern highlighted by MIT research showing that passive AI use can actually reduce cognitive abilities and neuroplasticity.

The company's flagship product, NUU Surf, exemplifies their approach to cognitive augmentation. Unlike traditional summarization tools that compress information and risk losing critical details or introducing inaccuracies, NUU Surf presents documents in multiple hierarchical layers of abstraction. Users can seamlessly "surf" through these layers – zooming from high-level summaries of entire documents down through section summaries, heading summaries, paragraph summaries, and ultimately to the original text itself. This innovative interface allows readers to quickly identify relevant information while maintaining the ability to verify accuracy by accessing the source material at any level of detail. The product represents what the founders describe as "a new way to read" – transforming the linear, time-consuming process of traditional reading into a dynamic, multi-dimensional experience.

Beyond NUU Surf, NUU Cognition envisions an entire ecosystem of cognitive tools under what they call the "Cognition OS" (COS) – a personalized suite of applications designed to work together seamlessly. This ecosystem includes planned products like NUU Echo for enhanced audio consumption, NUU Transform for converting information between different mediums, NUU Branching for non-linear conversation interfaces with AI, NUU Remember for memory enhancement, NUU Dash for micro-learning moments, and NUU Revise for advanced spaced repetition learning. All these tools are designed to be compatible through a universal markdown format, creating an integrated system for knowledge management and cognitive enhancement.

The company's vision extends far beyond individual products. The founders aim to establish a new academic discipline they call "Applied Metacognition" or "Cognitive Engineering" – a field dedicated to developing thinking technologies based on both academic research and practical experience. They draw from diverse influences including systems thinking, metacognition research, and personal reflection on cognitive processes. Their approach is grounded in first principles thinking about how humans actually process information, learn, and make decisions, rather than simply applying existing psychological theories.

What sets NUU Cognition apart is their philosophical commitment to enhancing rather than replacing human thinking. While many AI companies focus on automation and doing work for users, NUU Cognition's tools are designed to help users think better and more efficiently while remaining actively engaged in the cognitive process. This philosophy stems from the founders' observation that current AI tools often promote passive consumption, leading to decreased critical thinking skills and reduced neuroplasticity. Their solution is to create tools that prompt active engagement while reducing friction in information processing.

The company is built on a foundation of technical excellence and innovative development practices. The founding team consists of AI engineers who are pioneers in using cutting-edge development methods, including advanced prompt engineering systems and agentic coding. They've adopted an "AI-first" approach to their own operations, meticulously documenting all meetings, decisions, and knowledge in a structured format that can be leveraged by AI systems to accelerate development. This meta-approach – using cognitive augmentation tools to build cognitive augmentation tools – exemplifies their commitment to practicing what they preach.

Perhaps most ambitiously, NUU Cognition sees itself as more than just a company – they view their work as a mission to upgrade human cognition at a societal level. They believe that thinking is humanity's greatest asset and that current tools and methods have barely scratched the surface of what's possible. By creating a new category of software focused specifically on cognitive enhancement, establishing academic legitimacy for their field, and building a community around these ideas, they aim to catalyze a broader transformation in how humanity approaches learning, thinking, and problem-solving.

The founders' personal investment in the problem is evident throughout their discussions. They're building these tools primarily to solve their own cognitive challenges, with the belief that solutions that work for them will resonate with others facing similar struggles. This authentic, problem-first approach, combined with their technical capabilities and expansive vision, positions NUU Cognition as a potentially transformative force in the intersection of human cognition and artificial intelligence.

The meeting revolved around a group of university students strategizing for a startup competition, focusing on assembling a diverse team comprising backgrounds in neuroscience, research, data science, engineering, and potentially psychology, education, or UI/UX design to meet the competition's strict criteria for multidisciplinary collaboration, with members humorously "grifting" their credentials and reaching out to additional recruits like a design specialist; they emphasized pitching their idea effectively in a three-minute window without over-relying on personal demographics like race or immigrant stories, instead highlighting their AI expertise for quick market and competitor analysis, noting the scarcity of true cognitive augmentation tools amid existing AI suites that merely offer chatbots without deep thinking integration. The core idea centered on augmenting human cognition to counteract AI's dumbing effects, referencing studies like an MIT one showing reduced neuroplasticity from tools like ChatGPT, positioning their product as an intentional enhancer that prompts active thinking, maintains brain activity, and draws from neuroscience to foster essential skills, distinguishing it from passive AI aids by emphasizing partnership between user and AI for clearer, more intentional cognitive improvement. Team logistics included using Discord for communication, integrating with WhatsApp, and coordinating attendance at an upcoming Monday event, fueled by personal motivations such as rivalries with ego-driven startup peers whose apps they deemed simplistic, driving a commitment to "lock in" post-exams and dive into collaborative work without letting others down. Theoretically, the discussion delved into metacognition as thinking about thinking, deriving frameworks from first principles and personal reflection rather than psychology or academia, critiquing self-help books for stopping at observations without implementation, and incorporating learning theories like spaced repetition and the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve, exemplified by apps like Anki but noting their limitations, with a vision for research via user interactions to outpace academic studies by leveraging experiential, non-measurable insights for directly applicable theories. Technically, they outlined infrastructure starting with AI @ DSCubed as a sandbox for building an autonomous AI organization through captured data provenance, applying it to their project via recordings, transcripts, and a markdown-based knowledge system in Obsidian—a file-centric note-taking app enabling flat structures, hyperlinks, embeddings, and Git sync for AI compatibility, eschewing folder hierarchies or proprietary databases like Notion's. This fed into the broader "Cognition OS" (COS) ecosystem, a plug-and-play suite of web-based tools tailored to users (e.g., NUU Surf for text interaction, audio tools for transcripts and UI enhancements, NUU Branch for branching LLM conversations), using markdown as a universal standard for interoperability, targeting niches like autistic users or general audiences, with potential Obsidian integration and expansion akin to Google or Microsoft ecosystems amid de-Googling trends, while acknowledging competitors like ICanStudy for study techniques but lacking software. For the competition, they planned to scout judges' preferences on Monday, simplify their pitch to intuitive demos of 2-3 products without full functionality or edge cases, using development tools like Claude Code (via the expensive Max tier) and the BMAD method—an advanced prompt system mimicking Agile with epics, stories, tasks, role-switching (e.g., spec definer, developer, reviewer), and automated documentation/updates for efficient, tested code generation. Finally, recruitment progressed with confirming a new member's Sunday 2-4 PM meeting at university for innovative strategy and idea grounding, potentially labeling her as UI/UX, while dismissing past winners' ideas (e.g., ear protection, balding sunscreen) as underwhelming, confident their AI-driven cognitive tools and demos would dominate against non-technical commerce students, aiming to establish and own the untapped field of cognitive enhancement.

The meeting commenced with a pitch for NUU Cognition, an umbrella company aimed at augmenting human thinking through software intersecting cognition and AI, exemplified by NUU Surf—a tool enabling multi-level summarization of documents from essay-wide overviews down to sentence-level details, with a zoomable UI allowing users to "surf" through abstraction layers via mouse wheel scrolling for efficient, lossless information consumption, distinguishing it from inaccurate AI summarizers by preserving access to original text and emphasizing cognitive enhancement over mere convenience. Participants discussed cognitive diversity, noting how tools like NUU Surf empower varied thinking styles—abstract versus detail-oriented—while querying the underlying framework, which involves inventing novel interaction mediums inseparable from software implementation, with no MVP yet but rapid progress anticipated via the team's AI @ DSCubed involvement in building autonomous AI organizations through data capture and ingestion, leveraging advancements in agenic coding for faster development; Yash shared her expertise in AI for organizational dynamics, personality-based role assignment, and personal frameworks, expressing interest despite verbal processing challenges and requesting textual materials for better retention. The vision expanded to NUU Branching, a chat UI innovation addressing linear LLM conversations by enabling users to highlight and branch off sub-concepts (e.g., unfamiliar terms in a quantum mechanics explanation) into visual graphs of connected conversation blocks, zoomable for traceability without endless mind-map messiness, drawing from tools like Obsidian or Excalidraw but focusing on simple rectangles to solve UI traceability issues, with Yash referencing prior mind-map research and sharing a case study visualization of neural networks in SPSS for employee turnover analysis, mapping decision trees with inputs like gender, age, and bias to illustrate controllable AI outcomes via data integrations. Team alignment solidified with Yash joining for collaborative problem-solving over prizes, committing to weekends amid studies, while delving into metacognition as "thinking about thinking"—distinct from stagnant traditional psychology by deriving first-principles frameworks from personal intuition and experience rather than measurable studies, exemplified by mental models and systems thinking as "thinking technologies" with untapped potential for societal advancement. Competition logistics outlined a six-week timeline to a three-minute video pitch due September 5, followed by potential finals on September 23 with four-minute presentations and Q&A among eight teams, structured via weekly sprints, Notion for planning, Discord for communication, and Obsidian as a markdown-based, Git-synced knowledge vault for centralized, AI-accessible notes—enabling exportable contexts for LLMs to augment cognitive work, prioritizing files-first philosophy over proprietary platforms like Notion. The grand vision encompassed a compatible suite of markdown-centric tools: NUU Echo for audio indexing and rewindable podcasts/books; NUU Transform for lossless medium conversions like lectures to articles; NUU Remember for advanced mnemonics; NUU Dash for micro-learning in idle moments via quick context-loading; NUU Revise for semantic spaced repetition beyond rote apps; all integrable into Cognition OS (COS), a personal, plug-and-play ecosystem blending cloud-based web apps with local systems, potentially hosted online for accessibility while distinguishing collaborative/organizational from individual variants. This fed into establishing "Applied Metacognition" or "Cognitive Engineering" as a new discipline driving societal thinking evolution—beyond company products to initiatives like communities and open-sourcing—mirroring efforts like Cabrera Labs' systems thinking but rebranded for broader impact, addressing scalability questions on individual-versus-organizational adoption and collaborative personalization as discipline-level challenges. Collaboration philosophy emphasized intuitions over rational debate, viewing reasons as post-hoc rationalizations and proposing a framework for disagreements scaled by impact (low-high), certainty, and difference—advocating silence for low-stakes, concern-raising for medium, and full discussions only for high-confidence/high-impact clashes to prioritize speed and ownership, exemplified in scenarios like UI feedback or coding methods; this itself a thinking technology for efficient communication, with suggestions for soft launches, self-published research for credibility, and tailored framing for diverse audiences amid societal development lags. The session concluded with MBTI discussions—identifying INTJ and INTP types—to inform interpersonal dynamics, acknowledging personality evolution and the framework's utility for self-aware, advanced collaborators, all recorded for reference.

The meeting focused on strategizing for a six-week startup competition timeline ending with a preliminary three-minute video pitch on September 5th and finals on September 22nd, emphasizing weekly sprints to define key pitch elements including a clear problem statement (e.g., brain drain from AI tools like ChatGPT reducing neuroplasticity per MIT studies, inefficient text consumption with irrelevant info, hallucinations, lost context, and inability to apply knowledge), market analysis (existing summarizers fail due to inaccuracy and information loss, targeting a niche in dense non-fiction text like research papers, textbooks, essays, and scholarly articles rather than novels or poems), solution via NUU Surf as an innovative UI for "a new way to read" textual information—starting with high-level summaries zooming progressively deeper into sections, headings, paragraphs, sentences, and original text for efficient, lossless "surfing" without traditional line-by-line reading or skimming, augmented by features like search bars to extract connected ideas across paragraphs (e.g., querying "food problems" in an essay to pull relevant summaries), AI-generated diagrams (using tools like Mermaid for visual aids on concepts), personalization options (e.g., jargon levels or highlight-based note-taking with warnings for un-read originals to ensure accuracy), and potential integrations for goal-based reading (e.g., inputting "what do you want from this text?" to tailor outputs)—positioned as an entry point to a broader NUU Cognition ecosystem of compatible tools like NUU Branching or NUU Echo, with markdown compatibility for interoperability; target users were pinpointed as Gen Z students in law, psychology, arts, philosophy, and history who consume dense text for critical thinking and application, extending to researchers, entrepreneurs, market analysts, and organizations (e.g., labs, governments, enterprises like Deloitte or FBI for productivity boosts), avoiding shallow text consumers or fiction readers initially to niche down while acknowledging scalability trends toward Gen Alpha; branding avoided lumping with "summarizers" to evade associations with generic tools, instead framing as "knowledge synthesizer," "text distiller," or enhancer of information efficiency, time, effort, attention, and motivation, with a compelling story via real use cases (e.g., a student avoiding brain drain while researching) and a tagline like "NUU Surf: a new way to read," culminating in a brief ecosystem tease for investor appeal; business model discussions highlighted monetization challenges with low-spending students, proposing subscriptions ($7-20/month), enterprise contracts (e.g., $100k for 50,000 users), or freemium models, drawing from past winners' niche solutions (e.g., scalp sunscreen for balding people) and emphasizing financial oxygen over ethical grandeur, with market validation via competitor analysis (summarizers' boring paragraph UX) and user insights; team roles divided into technical development (three AI engineers using agenic coding with Claude/Gemini for rapid MVP/demo build in three weeks, starting back-end tomorrow at 2 PM post-workshop, aiming for functional front-end zoom/search/diagram features), business/finance modeling (templates for revenue projections, focusing on proven third-party service niches), user journey/storyboarding (framing pain points into narratives), market research (MIT study, summarizer efficacy papers), and user validation (immediate Google Form survey to friends/law students on reading challenges, summarizer usage why/not, desired features like zoom personalization, willingness to pay $7-20/month, and untapped ideas, unbiased to gather testimonials/insights for pitch credibility without demo dependency); actionables included finalizing the form tonight for quick distribution, technical sit-down tomorrow, ongoing updates on progress, and wrapping with motivational alignment—obsession with personally solving inefficient cognition (building regardless of win for self-use, hoping to translate to normals and make society smarter), belief in victory through real innovation over AI wrappers, and commitment to ecosystem expansion post-competition irrespective of team continuity.
