My spreadsheet has twelve tabs, and no two of them agree with each other. That is the plain state of tracking brain health as a retired accountant: the columns argue the way an audit trail argues with itself, one number always slightly out of step with the next. Underneath all that arguing sits one real question, the same one that got me into supplement testing and cognitive tracking in the first place: do capsules or audio-based tools actually move the numbers, or do they just move the mood.
Quick note before the comparison starts: some of the links below are affiliate links, and if you buy through them I earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I only put a product in this file after running it through the same tracking method as everything else. I am not a doctor, not a neuroscientist — just a retired accountant with a spreadsheet and a growing distrust of any bottle that will not show its work. Check with your own doctor before you change anything about your routine.
Two Approaches, One Cognitive Tracking Spreadsheet
Every entry starts the same way, whether it is a capsule or a set of headphones: a baseline. Mine came from a standard 30-point cognitive screening test, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which is the kind of thing a doctor hands you on a clipboard rather than something you would find in a supplement ad. I was not anywhere near a clinical concern, but the score sat lower than I wanted, and a retired accountant does not love a number that sits lower than he wants.
Alongside the spreadsheet I still keep a paper backup, an actual ringed notebook, mostly out of habit from thirty years of audit trails needing a hard copy somewhere. There is a specific snag you feel flipping through it too fast during a weekly review, the wire catching at the page edge for half a second before it lets go. That small hitch is closer to real evidence than most of what is printed on a supplement label — and yes, I am aware that a grown man getting sentimental about a spiral notebook is exactly the kind of thing that happens after thirty years of loving spreadsheets a little too much.
Does the FDA Actually Vet These Claims?
Short answer: not the way you would hope. The FDA does not pre-clear a supplement label before it reaches a shelf, which is one line item you have to weigh yourself rather than trust to someone else's review process. That single fact changed how I read every bottle after it — less like a finished report, more like a draft someone is asking you to sign off on without checking the math.
I built an entire method around that skepticism — you can read the full version in choosing the best nootropics for memory after fifty — but the short version is that a label without specifics gets filed as a high-risk asset and set aside. I have stopped trusting a bottle just because its copy sounds confident, which is really its own can of worms I have unpacked elsewhere on this site.
The Ginkgo Biloba Line Item That Never Paid Off
The clearest example of a total write-off sits early in the file: a bottle of ginkgo biloba tablets, picked up at the CVS on Spring Creek Parkway on a whim after reading one too many forum threads. I took them every morning for a stretch, logged them in the same column as everything else, and waited.
Not up. Not down. Just flat, while other rows on the same sheet kept shifting.
That is the entry I point to when someone asks whether I think every supplement is snake oil. I do not. I think most of them are simply unproven for a given person, which is a very different thing than being fake, and a retired accountant learns to tell the two apart the same way he learns to tell a bad quarter from a failing business.
Weighing Capsules Against Audio-Based Brain Health Tools
Once the ginkgo line item closed out, I moved to two more established capsule options, NeuroPrime and Neuro-Thrive. Both are the kind of thing most people picture when someone says brain supplement: a bottle, a scoop or two of capsules, an ingredient panel on the back. NeuroPrime carries a premium position and a reputation to match; Neuro-Thrive plays the budget end of the same category. Neither is a bad product on its own terms — my complaint was never quality, it was consistency. Some days the numbers cooperated. Other days the fog rating sat exactly where the ginkgo had left it.
If you are noticing early memory changes yourself, that inconsistency is the most frustrating part. You want a straight line on the chart, and cognition rarely gives you one. Even a supplement that is doing something real will show up as noise before it shows up as a trend, and most people quit checking right before the trend would have appeared.
Where the Two Approaches Actually Diverged
The capsule side of the ledger stayed noisy for the whole run. The audio side did something different. I started testing The Brain Song mostly out of skepticism — it is a different kind of input, closer to a software update than anything you swallow — and the recovery time after an afternoon slump was the first line item that actually moved in a direction and stayed there. I added The Genius Song as a second data point in the same category, mainly for deeper-focus stretches like reconciling our own household accounts, and it held up its side of the comparison well enough to stay in the file.
Something else confirmed the shift, and it did not come from a screen at all. It happened on a Saturday at the Allen Farmers Market, working through a crate of tomatoes, when I realized I was running the whole week's fog ratings in my head — no spreadsheet open, no notebook in hand — and they still landed close to what I would have typed in later that night. A neighbor of mine, who plays pickleball three mornings a week at the Allen Community Center, tells me his head feels just as clear on weeks he skips every bottle entirely, which is a fair reminder that the ledger has more line items than the ones sold on this page.
For anyone trying to choose between the two audio options specifically, I laid out the full side-by-side in My Spreadsheet Doesn't Lie: Comparing The Genius Song and The Brain Song, row by row, the same way I would compare two vendors bidding on the same contract.
So Which One Should You Try First?
Here is the honest trade-off, stripped of any pretense that one option wins outright. If you want a traditional format, a familiar ingredient panel, and you do not mind capsule-to-capsule variance while your body adjusts, a premium option like NeuroPrime is the more conventional bet — treat it like a long-term holding, not a quarterly trade. If you would rather test something that does not ask you to swallow anything, and you want a steadier read on the page once you get past being skeptical of it, The Brain Song is the one that moved my own numbers the most, for whatever one spreadsheet is worth as evidence.
Either way, do not expect a single dramatic entry that changes the whole page. What you are actually managing is closer to capital preservation than a turnaround story — keeping the mental gears from sliding rather than chasing a return to some younger version of the balance sheet. Whether that shift counts as ordinary wear on the ledger or something worth a closer look is its own question, one I keep separate from this file entirely. Whether any of it is worth the actual return on what you spend is a different audit again, and one I would rather run before you buy than after. Keep your own file honest, cross-check the entries yourself, and treat both approaches as a work in progress rather than a closed account.