Getting to Know the CEO Behind NextSense

It started with Belgian chocolates. It ended with a dinner conversation that changed everything JB Berent thought he knew about sleep — and about what he was supposed to be.

JB Berent is the founder and CEO of NextSense, the company building in-ear EEG technology to monitor and improve sleep. He is also, by any conventional measure, the wrong person for the job. He doesn't have an MD. He doesn't have a PhD. He was not trained as a sleep scientist, a neuroscientist, or a clinician. He taught himself machine learning on Coursera. He wrote a novel before breakfast. He holds a first-author credit on a peer-reviewed paper in Bioelectronic Medicine.

And he has had more consequential conversations about sleep science with more of the people who invented the field than most practicing sleep physicians ever will.

This is a story about how that happened.

The Chocolate Incident

The moment JB realized that sleep is a daytime problem — not a nighttime one — had nothing to do with a lab. It happened in his kitchen.

"A good friend gave me a box of Belgian chocolates for my birthday," he says. "They were so good, I had the entire bar around 8 p.m. I couldn't sleep until 1 a.m. — about three hours past my normal bedtime."

For most people, that's a one-night annoyance. For JB, it was a signal. He started experimenting — caffeine cutoffs, then the timing of naps, then blue light exposure, then core body temperature. What began as curiosity about a bad night became a decade-long personal research project into how every hour of the day quietly determines the quality of the night.

"Everything you do between waking up and lying down is casting a vote," he says. "The bedroom is just where the results get counted."

That insight — that sleep failure is built in daylight — is now the foundation of everything NextSense builds. It's also the argument most sleep advice gets exactly backwards.

Jason Bourne Memory and the Cognitive Surprise

When JB committed fully to polyphasic sleep in January 2016 — three or more naps spread through the day, structured into his schedule like meetings — he expected more energy. He did not expect to feel smarter.

"After the first couple of months, I was remembering things almost like I had an eidetic memory," he says. "Think Jason Bourne. I felt like consuming dense neuroscience textbooks. I was crunching through Andrew Ng's machine learning course on Coursera. The energy was expected. The cognitive boost was not."

The science explains it: sleep is when the brain consolidates memory, clears metabolic waste through the glymphatic system, and performs the kind of neural reorganization that makes new information stick. More sleep events — even short ones — means more consolidation cycles per day. The naps weren't rest breaks. They were processing runs.

He has now logged 4,881 naps in his NextSense data. The pattern is consistent: 10–20 minute naps improve afternoon performance and don't disrupt nighttime sleep. Naps over 45 minutes show up in the nighttime data as a cost. He didn't read that in a study. He lived it.

The Dinner With Dement

In 2016, JB was introduced to William Dement — the Stanford sleep researcher widely credited as the founder of modern sleep medicine — through Dr. Stephen LaBerge, the pioneering lucid dreaming researcher who had become JB's mentor.

Dement ran the most famous sleep science course in American university history at Stanford. JB, a polyphasic-sleeping Google employee with no academic credentials in sleep, was invited to guest lecture. He has been lecturing there ever since — one of a small number of non-PhD lecturers in the course's history.

But what stayed with JB wasn't the lecture. It was the dinner afterward.

"Dement said he was so happy someone from Google was interested in sleep," JB recalls. "Then, over dinner, he said something I've thought about ever since: 'JB, after 50 years of research, we still don't really know why we sleep or how much we need.'"

It was, paradoxically, the most liberating thing a founding figure of a scientific field had ever said to an outsider. The canon was still open. The questions weren't settled. The person who had spent the longest studying sleep was telling him there was still everything to discover.

Dement also told him about the Randy experiment — a famous case study in which a teenager was kept awake for nearly 14 days. By the end he was nearly impossible to manage. But after sleeping for 20 hours, he was fully restored. And Dement shared something that stopped JB cold: a mother orca essentially doesn't sleep for the first six months of her calf's life — and neither does the calf. Evolution, it turns out, has more flexibility with sleep than the textbooks suggest.

The Midnight Interruption

Meir Kryger is a sleep physician at Yale School of Medicine and co-editor, alongside Dement, of Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine — the canonical textbook every sleep physician trains on. He attended one of JB's lectures.

Midway through the talk, Kryger interrupted.

"It was a bit odd at first," JB says. "But then I realized who he was — and what he was telling me."

What Kryger told him was this: the word "midnight" traces directly to the biphasic sleep pattern that pre-industrial humans followed. Before artificial light, people slept in two distinct phases — a first sleep, then a waking interval, then a second sleep. "Midnight" described the midpoint of the night — the interval between the two. It was a linguistic fossil of the way humans actually slept before electricity told us otherwise.

A man who had co-edited the field's defining textbook had just walked into JB's talk and handed him a piece of history to keep.

Fresh Eyes

The third editor of Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine is Thomas Roth, one of the most published sleep medicine researchers alive, based at Henry Ford Health System in Detroit. He engaged NextSense for clinical collaboration in 2021, helping design the original sleep study protocols with Emory University — work that eventually contributed to NextSense's peer-reviewed paper.

Three editors. One textbook. Three separate moments of a scientific establishment choosing to engage with someone who had no business being in the room.

JB has a theory about why.

"They believe sleep medicine needs fresh eyes," he says. "The ego involved in academic research prevents bolder, more controversial approaches. As they got to know me, I think they saw someone who belonged more in the Renaissance than today — multidisciplinary in the way that philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians were 200 years ago."

"Today, people get a PhD and focus on some incredibly narrow piece of research — almost ensuring publication because it only incrementally adds to the field and doesn't ruffle the establishment's feathers. I don't have to worry about that. My papers, my positions are based on my own research — sometimes funded by NextSense, sometimes by my own observational studies of myself and others. I don't worry about my academic reputation. I think that was refreshing to them."

The Paper

In May 2026, Bioelectronic Medicine — a Springer Nature journal — accepted a paper titled "A novel, wearable, in-ear EEG technology to assess sleep and daytime sleepiness." JB Berent is the lead and corresponding author. Co-authors include researchers from Emory University, Takeda, and Henry Ford Health System.

It took ten rounds of revision.

"The paper is seminal for NextSense," JB says. "It shows how closely you can match clinical-grade sleep scoring in the ear with our solution." But beyond the science, it represents something else: a decade of personal experimentation, institutional credibility built through relationships rather than credentials, and a founding thesis — that sleep can be measured, understood, and improved outside a hospital — now documented in the scientific record.

He is not a doctor. He has never claimed to be. But the doctors know his name.

What This Means for You

JB started NextSense because he believed technology could help people sleep better, and that better sleep would help people live better lives. He still believes that. But he has added a corollary: technology alone isn't enough, and sometimes it's the problem.

"The only way to complement the good use of technology and combat the bad is through personal storytelling," he says. "My story is unique. I know it's unique because William Dement told me sleep is still a mystery after 50 years. Because Meir Kryger interrupted my lecture to give me a gift. Because Thomas Roth helped us design our clinical protocols."

"I don't need a credential to sit at that table. What I need — what I've always needed — is something harder to fake: results."