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| What We Got Wrong |
10 years ago
You’re born with every brain cell you’ll ever have. Once they’re gone, they’re gone for good. |
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Now
Your brain keeps making fresh memory cells — even past 70. In 2025, scientists finally caught the cells that build them. |
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| Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm · Science, 2025 |
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| Shape Rotation |
| Spatial reasoning is picturing how a shape looks once you turn it — the knack behind reading a map or backing into a parking spot. Shape Rotation trains it. Try to match each one in a few seconds. |
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Five Bottles vs. One: The Math Surprised Me
I spent an evening pricing out a brain stack.
You see, the ingredient list I keep coming back to is short. Bacopa for memory recall… lion’s mane for nerve growth support… gotu kola, schisandra, and shilajit as the adaptogen base.
Buy them separately and you need five bottles from five different brands. Quality varies wildly. My cart came to just over a hundred dollars a month. And you still have to remember five different pills.
Then a reader pointed me to NeuroVera. Same core ingredients, one formula, two capsules in the morning. At the six-bottle rate it works out to about a dollar a day.
The protocol, the way I would run it:
WHEN: morning, with water.
DURATION: 12 weeks. That is the window the bacopa trials used.
RULES: two capsules, daily, no skipping weekends.
If it does nothing for you, the 365-day refund means the experiment cost you postage. That is a trade an engineer can live with.
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| Why Alzheimer’s Steals Your Sleep |
| Poor sleep and Alzheimer’s travel together. For years, most of us blamed the plaques. Those are the sticky clumps of protein that build up in the brain. They seemed the obvious thief. New work points somewhere else. |
| Researchers at the University of Kentucky studied mice with Alzheimer’s-type plaques. The mice slept badly. So the team quieted the brain’s immune cells — tiny cells called microglia that work as the brain’s cleanup and security crew. The mice gained more than two hours of deep sleep a night. And the plaques never moved. |
| Let me explain what that means. The plaques weren’t robbing the sleep. The alarm was. When microglia spot plaques, they switch on and flood the area with inflammation. Picture a smoke detector that keeps shrieking long after the toast is scraped clean. That noise keeps the brain from dropping into deep rest. |
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This is the part that stays with me. The sleep damage may begin the instant those cells react — not after years of buildup. So the window to help could open earlier than anyone thought. |
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| I could be wrong about how this plays out in people. This was mice, and quieting the immune system is not something you can try at home. We’re talking about research in progress. But I believe it reframes the tie between sleep and memory. |
| So guard your deep sleep now. Treat it like it matters — because for your brain, it clearly does. |
| University of Kentucky · Alzheimer’s & Dementia, July 2026 |
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| A Daily Handful Of Berries |
| Begin with the tastiest habit here. Berries are one of the few brain habits that feel like a treat. Blueberries and strawberries are loaded with anthocyanins — the natural pigments that give them their deep color. Those pigments cross into the brain and gather in the areas that handle learning and memory. |
| There they calm inflammation and ease the daily wear on brain cells. In a long Harvard study of thousands of older women, those who ate two or more servings a week held their memory longer — by about two and a half years. That’s an association, not proof. Still, the price is a bowl of fruit. |
| The Protocol |
| When |
| Once a day — with breakfast or as an afternoon snack. |
| Duration |
| Daily, for the long haul. Give it months, not days. |
| Rules |
| One handful, about half a cup. Fresh or frozen both work. Skip the added sugar and the juice — whole berries win. Stir them into plain yogurt or oatmeal if you like. |
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| No berries in the house? A frozen bag keeps for months and costs less. I urge you to try it — it may be the easiest habit on this list. |
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| A Protein That Shields Memory From Tau |
| Tau is a troublemaker protein. It twists into tangles that choke brain cells from the inside. Scientists in California found a natural helper, a protein called SORLA, that pushes back. Mice given extra SORLA had fewer tangles, less brain shrinkage, and healthier links between cells. Mice without it fared worse. It’s a target for future drugs, not a pill you can take yet — but a hopeful lead. |
| Sanford Burnham Prebys · Science Advances, July 2026 |
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| A Cannabis Combo Calmed Late-Stage Agitation |
| Agitation is one of dementia’s cruelest turns — the restlessness, the distress. In a trial of 120 people with advanced dementia, a measured mix of THC and CBD (the two main compounds in cannabis) eased agitation far more than a dummy pill. The calm held for twelve weeks. This was for people already in hospice care, under close watch. It’s not a do-it-yourself fix — but a real option worth raising with a doctor. |
| Georgetown / AAIC 2026, London · July 2026 |
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| Small Heart Troubles Show Up In The Brain |
| Your brain runs on blood flow. It drinks up about a fifth of what your heart pumps. So when the heart slips even a little, the brain feels it. German researchers tracked 73 adults, average age 55, for about three and a half years. Those with mild heart weakness — too subtle to be called heart failure — showed early wear in memory regions, and that wear tracked with later memory trouble. A strong heart is a strong brain. |
| Max Planck Institute, Leipzig · Journal of Neuroscience, 2026 |
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| Red Light Therapy For The Brain |
| The pitch sounds a little odd. Shine near-infrared light on your head and think more clearly. There’s a real idea underneath it. The light reaches brain cells and gives their power plants — the mitochondria — a small lift, while easing inflammation. In a 2025 trial of 90 stroke survivors, the light improved thinking and mood. Early tests in brain fog and head injury look promising too. |
| But the gaps are wide. No large trial has tested it in healthy older brains. No device is cleared to treat or prevent dementia. Doses and headsets vary a lot, and the better ones run from hundreds to thousands of dollars. |
| Verdict: Promising for real injuries, unproven for prevention. Low-risk to try with a doctor in the loop — but don’t bank your memory on it yet. |
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