What you love
tells us who you are.

Personality tests are self-reports. You tell us who you think you are, filtered through how you want to be seen. Music response is different. How you rate a song, what you say about it, who you agree with, what you click on, whether you reach out to someone who heard the same thing — these are reactions, not performances. They are harder to fake.

Cognitive Profiling is the study of what those reactions reveal. Not just taste. Cognitive patterns. How someone processes emotional information. What they pay attention to. What they ignore. Whether they are drawn toward people whose reactions match theirs. Music is the instrument because it produces strong, fast, involuntary responses in nearly everyone. That makes it one of the richest behavioral datasets available if you know how to read it.

The broader implication is medical. A cognitive profile built from cultural response could inform how environments are designed for specific populations, how therapeutic interventions are personalized, and how the cognitive changes that come with aging or neurological conditions are detected early. This is where Cognitive Profiling meets the lab's broader environmental therapeutics mission.

The diagnostic instrument for Cognitive Profiling is the behavioral dataset WAXFEED generates: song and album ratings, interaction patterns in the global radio chat, what users click on in the feed, how they respond to different genres and eras, and whether the relationships they form through the platform persist over time.

Underneath the product, WAXFEED trains on music theory, song lyrics, and user behavior to build cognitive models. The model observes how people rate music, how they explain their ratings, and how their tastes cluster relative to others. The question is: does that dataset, read correctly, produce a cognitive profile that predicts something real about how someone thinks, connects, and processes the world?

The diagnostic methodology is being developed in parallel with the platform. Every user interaction is potential signal. The research designs what signal to look for.

WAXFEED is the therapeutic environment for Cognitive Profiling. It is a music discovery platform built around what is culturally alive right now: when the Drake/Kendrick discourse surfaced a summer's worth of music conversation, WAXFEED surfaces the discography and lets you rate it, debate it in a global radio chat, and factor in editorial pieces if you want them. The platform meets people where cultural energy already is.

The therapeutic dimension is the connection layer. WAXFEED is measuring whether people whose cognitive profiles are closely matched form real, lasting relationships. The platform surfaces proximity not just in music but in mind. If two people react to music the same way, process it the same way, notice the same things, the hypothesis is that they are more likely to become actual friends, not just mutual followers.

There is a third layer. WAXFEED is also the cultural soundtrack for PolarityGPS. As you explore a city through proximity-based missions, WAXFEED surfaces music by the local artists performing in the venues you are discovering. The cognitive profile built through WAXFEED informs what music surfaces as you navigate the city. The platform's two applications — discovery and profiling — compound each other.

Cognitive Profiling is a new field. If you work in music cognition, affective computing, behavioral data science, recommender systems, or cognitive neuroscience, and you have a project or methodology that fits, Polarity Lab may be the right home. The diagnostic instrument is being built now. The field is open.