They arrive in cheerful bottles with names that sound like promises — Daily Brain Boost, Brain Drive, Brain guard+. And Americans, in turn, spend billions of dollars each year chasing the idea of a sharper mind.
This is the logic of the moment: that the self is something to be tuned and upgraded, its limits negotiable through the right regimen of diets, workouts, injections, pills, powders and gummies. Cognitive health, once the domain of aging and illness, has become another frontier for optimization.