My Spreadsheet Doesn't Lie: Six Weeks with Memory Wave and My Tracking Notes

A Gravity score of two hundred on ClickBank means one thing only: plenty of people bought the product and didn't ask for a refund. It says nothing about what happened to any one of their brains afterward. Confusing the two is the most common mistake I run into in brain health circles, and it's the first thing worth correcting before anyone spends a cent chasing memory-optimization claims, cognitive tracking, or supplement testing in general.

People see a bestseller badge and treat it like a guarantee. It's a sales report, not a lab result — and the gap between those two documents is where most of the bad decisions in this space get made.

Three decades of corporate accounting taught me that a ledger doesn't lie, even when the person reading it wants it to. Missing a longtime client's name in a meeting for the third time was what finally moved my retirement date up, and I pointed the same habit at my own head instead of somebody else's books — in the spare bedroom in our Plano house that's now my home office, one monitor permanently open to the tracker, the other to whatever question sent me down a research hole. My wife likes to point out that the resulting spreadsheet now has more tabs than our old tax returns, and I don't have a column that disproves her.

None of what follows is medical advice — I'm not a doctor or a neuroscientist, just a retired numbers guy auditing his own results. This site carries affiliate links, and a purchase through one earns a commission at no extra cost to you; I only write up protocols I've actually logged, because an unaudited recommendation isn't worth publishing. Check with your own doctor before changing anything about your health, especially if memory changes are what brought you here.

The Myth: If the Number Moved, the Supplement Gets the Credit

Here's the myth I keep running into, in comment sections and in my own head before I started tracking anything seriously: if a number in your log goes up after you start a supplement, the supplement did it. Correlation gets treated like an audited fact. It isn't one, not until you've ruled out everything else that happened during the same stretch.

Take The Brain Song as the example, since it's the one I ended up recommending. What caught my eye first wasn't the audio-based format, it was a Gravity number over two hundred, which in ClickBank terms means plenty of buyers and very few refund requests. In accounting language, that's a low return rate. It tells you people were satisfied enough not to ask for their money back. It doesn't tell you why, and it definitely doesn't tell you what happens in your specific ledger.

That's it. That's the whole flaw in the popularity argument.

What a Gravity Score Actually Measures in Supplement Testing

I've run enough products through my own columns by now, Lion's Mane Mushroom, a handful of capsule stacks, an audio-based approach or two, to know that market validation and personal validation are separate audits. Sorting out which specific ingredients keep showing up across these formulas is its own filing project, one I won't try to compress into this piece. What matters here is simpler: a label promising a standardized Ginkgo Biloba extract ratio and a spreadsheet showing an actual change in your own numbers are two different documents. Only one of them is about you.

The Confounds I Rule Out Before I Credit Anything

Before any protocol gets credit for a change, I isolate what else moved during the same window. Coffee is its own confound, and I keep it in a separate column so a good caffeine day doesn't get filed under the supplement's account. Sleep gets the same treatment; one rough night wrecks my numbers regardless of what I swallowed that morning, and pretending otherwise would be bad bookkeeping. Stress is a third line item worth watching, since a heavy stretch at home will tank a focus score with or without help from any bottle. Under all of that sits a placebo baseline — the part of any improvement that shows up just from paying closer attention to yourself, which is real and separate.

Some of this checking happens away from the desk entirely. A chunk of my focus-duration tests happen on the trails at Craig Ranch Park in McKinney, where I name landmarks heading out and count how many come back to me on the way in — a field test that costs nothing and catches things a screen-based quiz misses. Not everything I tried held up under that kind of scrutiny. A raw kale and blueberry smoothie every weekday morning was supposed to be the fix, on the theory that repairing breakfast would repair my head, and it didn't move a single column — the only real change was how early the blender woke the house. The actual moment I noticed something had shifted wasn't dramatic at all. A waiter came back for my order not long ago, and I realized I'd only glanced at the menu once — no second pass, no re-reading the specials the way I used to need to — and ordered anyway, like double-checking had quietly stopped being required.

Vernon's Spending Ceiling

My neighbor Vernon runs an informal version of this same experiment two blocks over, and he's drawn his own line on what he's willing to spend before he's seen someone else's numbers first. That's not a bad filter, but it answers a different question than the one this piece is correcting. Price and popularity are both surface data — a Gravity score measures the first, sticker shock measures the second, and neither one substitutes for what actually happened inside a tracked window. Set NeuroPrime next to something like Neuro-Thrive and the honest read is that a higher price buys a traditional capsule format and premium shelf placement, not a guaranteed outcome. An audio-based option like The Brain Song sits at a noticeably lower price point, and cost alone tells you nothing about whether it'll be the one that shows up in your own columns. Whether the monthly outlay is worth it is its own return-on-investment question, entirely separate from whether you notice any change at all.

If a lower monthly number matters more to you than anything else, Neuro-Thrive is a reasonable place to start your own trial without straining the household budget. But budget-first and evidence-first are different filters, and this piece is only correcting the second one.

So What Actually Counts as Evidence?

The actual test is narrower than most people want it to be. If a change in your recall or focus numbers only shows up after you've stripped caffeine, sleep, and stress out of the same stretch (not before), that's a result worth trusting. If it disappears once those three are accounted for, the supplement didn't do it; Tuesday did. How you structure the columns to make that comparison possible is a longer setup than fits here. Isolating working memory specifically from general recall, or verbal recall from either one, is its own methodology, and so is telling an ordinary afternoon slump apart from something worth watching, or sorting normal changes after fifty from something that needs more attention. The rule I actually use is simpler than all of that: no credit to any protocol until the story still holds up after caffeine, sleep, and stress have been pulled out of it.

For most people asking this question, The Brain Song is the protocol I'd point to first — not because of the Gravity score, but because it's the one that held up once the confounds were stripped out of my own numbers. If a bigger price tag and a traditional capsule format matter more to you than the audio format, NeuroPrime is the premium alternative worth running through the same test.

Where This Leaves the Ledger

Running The Brain Song through that filter is what earned it a place on my shelf ahead of the other bottles lined up there — audited, not just popular, and steady enough that my neighbor Pam has mostly stopped showing up with sympathy casseroles every time she notices the desk light on past dark. That doesn't make it medicine, and passing my personal audit doesn't guarantee it passes yours. The same filter applies no matter what's being tested, whether the input is sound frequencies, a capsule, or something as ordinary as Vitamin B12: strip out the confounds first, and only then decide who gets the credit.

If you want to see what an audited comparison looks like instead of a Gravity-score guess, here's the one I ran: Get The Brain Song and start your own audit today. Build your confound columns before you build your conclusion, and check with your own doctor before changing anything — a retired accountant's spreadsheet doesn't replace one.