Why I Built CORTEX: A Neuroscience Approach to Focus
The story behind CORTEX and what neuroscience research taught me about deep work and attention management.
November 4, 2025
CORTEX did not come from a perfect plan. It came from being lost. When I first arrived at DKU, I had no idea who I was supposed to become. I switched majors, jumped between passions, tried neuroscience, biology, filmmaking, football, languages, tutoring, RA work, and a bit of everything. I was ambitious, but scattered. I cared a lot, but I had no real system to hold my life together. I was doing too many things with no structure to support them.
The very first spark for CORTEX came from something simple. I got introduced to anime that year, and Solo Leveling hit me harder than I expected. Watching a character track his stats, gain XP, and literally see himself evolve made something click. Life felt unmeasured. There was no way to know if I was becoming better. I wanted a way to see my own growth, even if it was small. Around that time, I started journaling inside ChatGPT and giving myself XP manually. Strength points for the gym, intelligence points for studying, discipline points for showing up. It was messy and honestly a bit goofy, but it was the first system that made progress feel real to me.
Everything changed when I went to Shanghai for my SJTU medical school internship. That experience was completely transformative. I met researchers who worked at a different level, learned how real labs operate, saw how serious academic work can get, and for the first time, I learned how to code properly. Not little scripts or shortcuts, but real programming. Real logic. Real debugging. It opened a new part of my brain. Suddenly the fake XP system I kept in ChatGPT did not have to stay fake. I had the tools to build something real.
At the same time, my neuroscience background started blending with everything I was learning. I understood how attention works, how dopamine shapes motivation, how habits form, and why feedback is so important for behavior change. I was also working on REWIRE for the Millennium Fellowship, which pushed me deeper into the link between neuroscience and discipline. All the pieces lined up. The XP system, the coding, the research, the chaos of my life, the need for structure. It became obvious that I needed a personal operating system, not scattered notes.
The first version of CORTEX was just a rough sketch on my iPad after a night out. Strength, discipline, intelligence, aura, XP. It looked stupid, but it made sense to me. I turned it into a shortcut. Then a dashboard. Then a prototype. Then a full app. I added features during lab breaks. I coded at 2 AM after long days. I tracked my life inside the same tool I was building. CORTEX was not a startup idea. It was a survival tool. It helped me manage research, physics and biology courses, football training, RA responsibilities, meetings, internships, and everything I had going on. I used it because I needed it.
Somewhere along the way, it stopped feeling like a personal hack and started feeling like a real system. The more I built, the more I realized this was not just about productivity. It was about identity. People want to see who they are becoming. People want their effort to mean something. People want a clear picture of their growth instead of just hoping things work out.
CORTEX grew out of my confusion, my interest in neuroscience, my obsession with leveling systems, my internship in Shanghai, my time journaling in ChatGPT, my academic pressure, and my need to bring order to a chaotic student life. It was never meant to be polished. It was meant to be useful. And somehow, the system that helped me survive is slowly becoming something other people want to use too.