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We are in the grip of a neuroscience renaissance. New research measuring the impact of nutrition, exercise and sleep on our health have turned attention from the body to the brain. How does my diet, for example, affect my ability to think? What foods can I eat in order to work faster and which of them should I avoid to prevent brain fog — or, further down the line, neurodegeneration?
Last week, a study tracking more than 130,000 adults in the US found those consuming two servings of processed red meat per week had a 14 per cent greater risk of developing dementia than those who ate fewer than three servings per month. In a UK study, the Lancet Commission suggested that nearly half of all dementia cases could be prevented if people adopted healthier lifestyles and took action to lower their cholesterol. Answers are flooding in: this is great progress. But one that comes against a medical crisis.
Globally, one in eight people is affected by a mental disorder, according to the World Health Organisation. Social media is weakening our attention spans and affecting the chemical makeup of our brains. In the US, we are now at a point where the diagnosis of ADHD in adults is four times that of children. The most common solution is an Adderall prescription: a drug linked to an increased risk of heart attack and strokes. It’s no wonder people are turning away from Big Pharma and towards new solutions.
Mark Effinger was way ahead of the curve when he founded Nootopia in 2004 — a brand of “nootropics”, or brain-boosting supplements, that has been used by more than 300,000 people. There are collagens, pills and juices, all designed to enhance alertness, concentration, wakefulness and memory. Unlike Adderall, these are natural remedies, rooted in ingredients we might today call “brain foods”. Effinger’s colleagues call him Mr Noots. After speaking with him for an hour, I’d call him a mastermind.
The Nootopia lab is a temple of data gathered over 20 years, and the company itself is an analytics powerhouse seeking to boost the brain, but gently. The doses recommended are minimal, the effects substantial. The supplements are meant to intervene almost without one noticing — except, of course, for the effect on performance. Effinger has always been a high performer. “When I was six my stepdad convinced me to get a chemistry set… By the time I was nine and a half, I’d built my first laser.” A high school dropout, he was earning more than his social sciences teacher before he was 18, he says (the two used to argue about Marx). He found an apprenticeship, making parts for nuclear reactors for $7.35 an hour; then spent much of his twenties in the US Air Force, during which he became an endurance cyclist, hang glider pilot, motorcycle canyon carver and a bodybuilder.
This quest for high performance ground to a sudden halt when his wife died of an overdose on the painkiller oxycodone. Effinger says she was addicted. He got ill and depressed, with dysregulated cortisol rushes and hypothyroidism: an underactive thyroid that doesn’t produce enough hormones.
Keen to heal himself and to challenge the pharmaceutical status quo which he says killed his wife, he launched the business for which he is now known. Nootopia’s cornerstone product, the Limitless NZT-48, took four years to develop, while his company’s mushroom supplement has helped people suffering from chronic pain manage their symptoms. Among his tips for boosting one’s energy without recourse to Big Pharma is to simply avoid heavy foods at breakfast. Biohacking — and in this case brain hacking — isn’t rocket science: it’s often the simplest tricks that are the most effective.
Important questions remain. Can we boost one area of the brain without this being detrimental to another? If we take a supplement to boost, say, the part of our brain responsible for analysis, will the part of the brain responsible for creativity be compromised by this enhancement? A good question, though perhaps naïve too. Nootropics, Effinger explains, do not dysregulate an equilibrium but rather make the brain more balanced by rectifying an Achilles heel.
“Many of the CEOs and senior executives in Silicon Valley that I’ve worked with are super performers,” he explains. But they were not perfect, often mitigating their weakness via a cocktail of unadvisable substances (“everything from Adderall to cocaine”) and by surrounding themselves “with really smart people” to “cover” the area in which they were lacking. Those substances were toxic and addictive; Nootopia offers products that aren’t. Effinger speaks of “down-titration”: the process of decreasing a dose (in this case, say, of mushroom capsules) over time, once a specific response has been achieved. Some of the most exciting new breakthroughs have come in the study of neurogenesis: the process by which the brain creates new neurons, which could lead to new treatments for brain disease.
This has always been Effinger’s goal: to rebuild neural pathways that may have been affected by trauma and redirecting the signals which our brains receive down an avenue that does not provoke a trigger or a knee-jerk reaction.
