Félix Schoeller
What if we could design novel neural states?
01Company
ReWire Neurotechnologies, Inc.
I am the founder and CEO of ReWire Neurotechnologies, Inc. We build software and hardware that put the brain into states that are otherwise rare or impossible to reach, and we test them against conditions where those states are missing, starting with anhedonia in depression. Our system learns what reaches a particular person, generates the experience that produces the response, and deepens it through wearables and neuromodulation. More than 3,000 people signed up before our first launch. We are always looking for designers, engineers, and people from HCI and media arts who want to rethink our relationship to computers, and to design new ways of connecting to the world and to each other.
Edge, our first product
An experience written for your life.
Tell Edge what you are working on. It writes a ten minute audio experience, voice and music, made to move you and show that part of your life from a new angle.
Coming January 2027.
02Past projects
BeSoundInventor and cofounder
BeSound turns body movement into sound in real time. It is in a randomized clinical trial for PTSD at AP-HP in Paris, and theatre companies use it to score plays live from the bodies of the actors.
LucyLed the development, with Fireside Project
Psychedelic therapy will only ever be as good as the person sitting with the patient. Lucy is a voice simulation made from more than 24,000 anonymized recordings of a psychedelic support line, so practitioners can practice before they meet anyone real. Mount Sinai uses it to rehearse MDMA assisted therapy.
HuxleyCocreated with Linc Gasking
Huxley was the first AI artist with an agent, built on generative models back in 2021, before image tools like Stable Diffusion were public. Its music video for Duran Duran premiered at the Billboard Music Awards.
03Research
Aesthetic chills are the shivers people feel during music, film, speech, or ritual. My work has been to make them measurable, predictable, and useful. A model I developed during my PhD at EHESS Paris framed chills as markers of learning, which gave the field a testable account of why they happen.
At MIT Media Lab and the Gonda Brain Research Center, I led the development of ChillsDB with Abhi Jain, the first validated library of stimuli that reliably induce chills, now used by dozens of labs across the world. With the team at MIT, we built Frisson, which showed that the response can be amplified through the body, and that amplifying it changes reward and social cognition.
At the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies, we conducted the largest behavioral study of chills to date, with more than 3,000 participants, and the largest EEG study, with more than 100. Together they show who experiences chills, what the brain does when they arrive, and how chills relate to self transcendence, reward learning in depression, and political orientation.
Related work covers interoceptive technologies for psychiatry and wearables that act below conscious awareness. Earlier, I was the first research fellow at CRI Paris, part of INSERM. My work has been funded by Joy Ventures, the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, Unlikely Collaborators, Sacred Bridge, the European Commission, and the French Ministry of Defense.
04Papers
05Press
Body based technologies for mental health and psychiatryPsychiatric Times
The Holy ShiverRadiolab
The Surprising Emotional Effects of Aesthetic ChillsNeuroscience News
06Bio
Félix Schoeller is the founder and CEO of ReWire Neurotechnologies, a Los Angeles company building technology to reliably predict and induce non ordinary states of consciousness for therapeutic and wellness purposes. He is also a senior research scientist at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies, where he studies aesthetic chills.