Biohack your brain

Why Your Brain Deserves Better Than You're Giving It

Kristen Willeumier's father flew marine combat helicopters in Vietnam with a squadron called the Ugly Angels, captained Pan Am 747s for a living, and spent twenty-five years in the fire service. He died in 2017 from a Parkinson's-like neurological condition. That fact sits at the center of this book, even when she isn't writing about him directly. *Biohack Your Brain* is what happens when a neurobiologist who watched her own father's mind slowly fail decides that nobody else needs to be that helpless, and then writes down everything she actually did to help him.

Willeumier earned her PhD in neurobiology at UCLA, took an NIH fellowship, and became Research Director at Amen Clinics, where she ran a clinical trial with one hundred active and retired NFL players from twenty-seven teams. The players had taken thousands of subconcussive hits over their careers and most of their brain scans were a mess. After six months on a protocol she designed around sleep, supplements, diet changes, and cognitive training, their cerebral blood flow returned, memory came back, mood lifted. They started calling her Coach K. Then she took the same protocol home and used it on her father, who had been told he had essential tremors for twenty years before anyone said the word Parkinson's. His grip steadied. His balance improved. He kept riding his horses, Velvet and Zippy, until close to the end.

The book's argument is simpler than the science behind it. Your brain is a living supercomputer that consumes between fifteen and twenty percent of your blood supply despite being only two percent of your body weight. It uses three times more oxygen than your muscles. It burns through forty to sixty percent of your circulating blood glucose and cannot store any of it. And almost everything you do, eat, drink, and think about either helps it run or grinds it down. Most people, Willeumier argues, are unwittingly grinding it down. Then they wake up at fifty with brain fog they attribute to age and at seventy with a diagnosis they think came out of nowhere. It didn't come out of nowhere. Cellular changes that lead to dementia begin in your thirties and forties. The question is whether you're paying attention.