The cashier at the Costco on Preston Road asks for the phone number on the membership account, pen already hovering over the screen, and I go completely blank. Ten digits I've used on forms and phones since sometime last decade, and my mind returns nothing but static. A guy behind me shifts his cart. I recite the area code, stall, then have to pull the number up on my own phone like it belongs to a stranger — the kind of moment that eventually turned into a full brain health audit I never planned on running.
Before I get further into this — I run affiliate links on this page, and if you buy something through one, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Everything I recommend here comes from my own testing and personal experience, not a press release. I'm not a doctor or a neuroscientist. I'm a retired accountant with a spreadsheet, so weigh what I say the way you'd weigh advice from the guy at the end of your street who happens to be decent with numbers.
The Numbers Finally Stopped Adding Up
That kind of blank used to happen once in a while and pass without much thought. Lately it felt less like an accident and more like a pattern. Four pages into a novel some nights, I'd realize I couldn't tell you which character was which from page one, and I'd have to flip back just to reorient myself. Neither one felt like a coincidence anymore.
So I did the only thing that has ever made me feel like I had some control over a problem: I built a spreadsheet. Not a note, not a journal — a proper workbook with columns and conditional formatting, because apparently my solution to a failing memory was to build it a filing cabinet. My wife says I've now made more tabs for my own head than I ever made for our old tax returns, which is either impressive or genuinely concerning depending on the day. That workbook is what I've come to think of as a running cognitive audit — a way of checking whether anything I add to my routine for brain health actually shows up as a result, instead of just a feeling.
How Do You Actually Score a Brain Supplement?
Every new bottle gets logged against a baseline I already have on file, not against how I happen to feel that particular morning. I run it through something close to a return-on-investment lens — the same one I used years ago when a client wanted to know if a piece of equipment was worth the capital outlay: does the output justify what went in, full stop. You can see how rough that early baseline actually looked in My First 30 Days Testing Brain Supplements — An Accountant's Audit of Mental ROI, back when I was still guessing at what to even measure. A bottle doesn't graduate from "testing" to "keeper" status because of one good day; it has to clear the same checkpoint more than once before it earns a permanent line in the budget.
Labels complicate this more than people expect. The label on the bottle and the actual line movement on my spreadsheet are two different documents, and I stopped assuming they'd agree with each other a long time ago. I also build in something like a placebo baseline before trusting any bump in score, since the first stretch with anything new always feels promising regardless of what's actually inside the capsule. That's the whole memory tracking discipline in a nutshell: measure first, feel later, and let the sheet argue with your gut when they disagree. My method has its own internal logic beyond that too — control periods, repeat measures, rules about when a shift counts as real movement versus noise — a whole ledger of its own I won't fully open up here.
NeuroPrime: The Premium Line Item
NeuroPrime is the priciest bottle I've ever put through the audit, and I felt every bit of that when I actually committed to logging it instead of just eyeing the label online. It sits at the top end of the "nootropics" category, and I'm the kind of guy who still clips coupons for steak, so giving it shelf space felt like a real capital decision rather than an impulse buy. My neighbor Vernon Ashby thinks anything over forty dollars a month is a scam waiting to happen, and he had opinions about the bottle sitting on my counter before I'd even opened it.
The results were real, just not dramatic: a steady climb in my scored memory checks and a Sunday crossword that went a little faster than it used to, nothing that announced itself the way a good ad would have you expect. If you want the full head-to-head, I laid the numbers out in Neuro-Thrive vs. NeuroPrime: A Side-by-Side Spreadsheet Comparison, but the short version is a solid "hold" rating: good results, high overhead, not something I'd push on a guy living on a fixed income without a second thought.
Neuro-Thrive and the B-Complex Vitamins Never Moved the Needle
Neuro-Thrive is the one that never showed up in the numbers, and I gave it a fair run precisely because it looked like the sensible, budget-friendly pick next to NeuroPrime. My scored checks barely shifted over the whole stretch. It's the supplement equivalent of paying for a subscription and only getting the read-only version — you're in, but you can't actually do anything with it.
The B-complex vitamins were a different flavor of disappointment. A neighbor recommended them with total sincerity, the way people recommend home remedies they've never measured against anything, and I tried a bottle mostly because it was cheap and she meant well. My spreadsheet showed exactly what I suspected it would.
Flat. No movement in the memory checks, none in the fog I'd been describing to my wife most evenings.
A recommendation from someone you trust isn't the same thing as a result you can chart, and that gap is exactly what a spreadsheet is for.
The Brain Song Changed the Word Retrieval Column
Headphones took over where the capsules left off once The Brain Song entered the log, an audio-based approach, not a pill, which took some getting used to for a numbers guy who likes things he can count and swallow. I gave it the same audit treatment as everything else: baseline first, then log, then compare, no exceptions just because the format felt unfamiliar for Plano.
Word retrieval — the gap between reaching for a name and actually landing on it mid-sentence — moved more than the general memory score ever did, and it moved further than anything with a capsule ever managed. There's a related pattern around the afternoon dip specifically, though that's really its own separate audit for another time. If you want the complete writeup, I put the full verdict in The Brain Song Review: My Data-Backed Verdict on Everyday Focus.
Balancing the Books: My Ongoing Brain Health Audit
My home office is just a converted spare bedroom in the house, but it's turned into command central for this whole project — two monitors, one permanently open to the master sheet and the other for whatever research rabbit hole I'm chasing, an old oak desk that survived the downsizing of my former firm, and a whiteboard slowly filling up with ingredient names and question marks nobody but me could explain. There's also a shelf of bottles lined up in the order I started testing them, like evidence tagged for a case file. Some evenings my wife wanders in holding a casserole dish that my neighbor Pam Godfrey dropped off, which is usually how I know a testing stretch has been running long enough for people down the street to notice.
Brain health, I've decided, works a lot like a return that never really closes, full of odd loopholes and things you didn't know counted as a liability until the number tells you otherwise. You can't audit it once and file it away, any more than you'd trust a single quarter to describe a whole fiscal year. Right now I've got a small trial running on The Genius Song to see where it lands next to my current top pick, though that column is still too thin to draw a real conclusion from.
If there's one rule I'd hand anyone starting their own version of this, it's simple: don't trust a feeling, trust a number you tracked before you started, and don't let a bottle graduate off probation just because the first few days felt good.
The Accountant's Choice
My honest pick, if you only take one thing from this whole audit, is still The Brain Song. It's the best result-per-dollar I've logged so far — no recurring high-overhead subscription, just a line item that actually shows movement in the results column.
None of this makes me any kind of medical authority — I'm still just a guy who's more comfortable with numbers than diagnoses. If your own mental ledger feels like it stopped balancing, see a doctor before you see a spreadsheet. Once that part is covered, a little tracking makes a strange problem a lot less frightening. It's harder to be scared of something once it has its own column.