Does The Brain Song Help Clear Brain Fog After Retirement?

Six products in, and I could count on one hand how many ever moved a single cell in my spreadsheet from red to something better. That's not a knock on brain supplements as a whole — it's just what the columns showed after I left the accounting business and started treating my own brain health the way I used to treat a client's books: audited, dated, cross-checked before I trusted any of it. Somewhere in that pile of tabs sits a question most retirees never write down anywhere. Does an audio program like The Brain Song actually do something about the fog, or does it just give you a new reason to hope?

My wife likes to point out that this brain-health workbook now has more tabs than our last three tax returns combined. That's either impressive or diagnostic, depending who you ask. I built it because a spreadsheet is the only tool I trust to keep me honest about supplement tracking, and because thirty years of reconciling other people's numbers left me unable to just "feel" better about something without a column to back it up. None of what follows is medical advice. I've got three decades of ledgers behind me and zero medical training, so read this as testing notes from one retired accountant, not a prescription for your own nootropic routine.

Brain Fog Doesn't Look the Same for Everyone

The brain fog that shows up after retirement isn't the same as being tired, and it doesn't always look dramatic from the outside. For me it shows up in small, specific ways. Four pages into a novel, and I'm flipping back to page one because I can't place which character just walked into the room. It's not a crisis. It's just a column that lands on red more mornings than I'd like, and not knowing why is what got me testing things in the first place.

Where the Capsules Left Off

Before audio ever entered the picture, the testing rotation was all capsules. NeuroPrime and Neuro-Thrive both got a full run through the tracking sheet. Both nudged a few numbers in the right direction without doing much to the stubborn red cells in the fog column. Capsules are easy to audit in one sense — you know exactly what you swallowed and when. But neither one touched the specific problem I was trying to solve.

Nothing about The Brain Song felt like a sure bet at first. Not a pill, an audio track, which sounded closer to creative accounting than anything else in the spreadsheet. But the adoption numbers behind it got hard to argue with. It carries a Gravity score over 200 on the platform that sells it, which in accounting terms reads less like a flash in the pan and more like a company with years of steady repeat business.

Tracking Supplements, Column by Column

Every product gets measured the same way I'd size up any other purchase — what it actually returns against what it costs, which is the same logic behind the monthly cost breakdown I ran on this site a while back. The whole sheet lives in Excel, because that's the tool I trust. One monitor stays locked on the master tab, and the other is free for whatever research question comes up that day. The bottles on the shelf behind the desk are lined up by the date I started testing each one, not by brand, because order matters more to an audit than packaging does.

A handful of the columns track narrow, specific things rather than a general how-do-I-feel score. One tracks how quickly a name or a word surfaces when I go looking for it. Another is just for the afternoon slump, kept separate from the morning numbers because it never behaved the same way. A third measures how fast I get through a page of figures, which is a different skill than whether I remember what was on it once I'm done. Standing in the checkout line at the Costco on Preston Road, running the cart total in my head before the register does it for me, is as good an informal version of that test as anything in the spreadsheet.

None of those numbers mean much without accounting for what else is going on. Coffee throws off a test if it isn't logged next to whatever else I'm measuring that day, so it gets its own column now. A bad night's sleep wrecks a score faster than any product could fix one. A stressful week at home skews a whole month's average, and that has nothing to do with what's in a bottle. Some of what shows up is just what fifty-five does on its own, not something any track or capsule undoes — a former colleague named Neil Trevisan is usually the one who reminds me of that when I get too excited about a green cell.

What the Label Doesn't Tell You

The label on a box and the column in my spreadsheet rarely tell the same story, so I've learned to trust the column. I stopped trying to sort every bottle into a tidy nootropic ingredient list a while back — that's a rabbit hole for a different kind of spreadsheet. Whether something is one ingredient doing one job or a dozen blended together changes how I read a result, though that's a longer conversation than one page has room for. It's also part of why I test products one at a time instead of stacking three or four together and guessing which one gets the credit.

A reader named Dorinda Szymanski, who runs her own version of this tracking habit, emailed a while back to point out that I hadn't left room in my method for what a plain, do-nothing week would look like anyway. Some good days show up whether or not anything changed, and she was right to catch it. I've since built that into the sheet. It's part of why I can say with some confidence that a daily crossword out of the Dallas Morning News, which I kept up for a stretch thinking the habit alone might sharpen something, never moved a single column. Nice way to spend part of a morning. Useless as an intervention, at least by what the sheet showed.

The Brain Song Against the Genius Song

The Genius Song was the other audio option in the rotation, and on paper it's a strong one — a conversion rate of 1.43% among its own buyers, which in plain terms means it holds onto people once they try it instead of losing them after one listen. It leans on a similar approach to The Brain Song, close enough that picking between them is more about which track you personally settle into than which one does something fundamentally different. I laid out a longer, side-by-side version of that question in how the audio option stacks up against the capsule route for recall, if pill-versus-track is what's actually on your mind.

Does the Spreadsheet Actually Back This Up?

If your own version of this fog feels serious, or it's getting worse instead of leveling out, that's a conversation for your own doctor, not a testing note on a blog. I have zero medical training — I know how to read a spreadsheet, not a scan. What I can say is that the columns tied to The Brain Song moved in a direction I was glad to see, without asking me to swallow anything new every morning, and for a guy who'd already run out of patience with capsules, that mattered.

Whether it does the same for you is genuinely something only your own tracking can answer — nobody's spreadsheet is a substitute for somebody else's. If the fog sounds familiar, and you'd rather test something yourself than take one more stranger's word for it, you can look at the program here and start your own column. Track it the same plain way I do: same time of day, same scale, no rounding up just because you want it to be working.