Dream of Bengali's.

Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain
only, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as
our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. Through it, in particular,
we think, see, hear and distinguish the ugly from the
beautiful, the bad from the good, the pleasant from the
unpleasant. It is the same thing which makes us mad or
delirious, inspires us with fear, brings sleeplessness and
aimless anxieties. . . . In these ways I hold that the brain is
the most powerful organ in the human body.
–HIPPOCRATES

Ready for the good news?
Nestled within your skull, mere inches from your eyes,
are eighty-six billion of the most efficient transistors in the
known universe. This neural network is you, running the
operating system we know as life, and no computer yet
conceived comes close to its awesome capabilities. Forged
over millions and millions of years of life on Earth, your
brain is capable of storing nearly eight thousand iPhones’
worth of information. Everything you are, do, love, feel,
care for, long for, and aspire to is enabled by an incredibly
complex, invisible symphony of neurological processes.
Elegant, seamless, and blisteringly fast: when scientists tried
to simulate just one second of a human brain’s abilities, it
took supercomputers forty minutes to do so.
Now for the bad news: the modern world is like The
Hunger Games, and your brain is an unwitting combatant,
hunted mercilessly and relentlessly from all sides. The way
we live today is undermining our incredible birthright,
fighting our optimal cognitive performance, and putting us
at risk for some seriously nasty afflictions.
Our industrially ravaged diets supply cheap and plentiful
calories with poor nutrient content and toxic additives. Our
careers shoehorn us into doing the same tasks over and over
again, while our brains thrive with change and stimulation.
We are saddled with stress, a lack of connection to nature,
unnatural sleep patterns, and overexposure to news and
tragedy, and our social networks have been replaced by The
Social Network—all of which lead ultimately to premature
aging and decay. We’ve created a world so far removed
from the one in which our brains evolved that they are now
struggling to survive.
These modern constructs drive us to compound the
damage with our day-to-day actions. We convince ourselves
that six hours in bed means we’ve gotten a full night’s sleep.
We consume junk food and energy drinks to stay awake,
medicate to fall asleep, and come the weekend go overboard
with escapism, all in a feeble attempt to grasp a momentary
reprieve from our daily struggle. This causes a short circuit
in our inhibitory control system—our brain’s inner voice of
reason—turning us into lab rats frantically searching for our
next dopamine hit. The cycle perpetuates itself, over time
reinforcing habits and driving changes that not only make
us feel crappy, but can ultimately lead to cognitive decline.
Whether or not we are conscious of it, we are caught in
the crossfire between warring factions. Food companies,
operating under the “invisible hand” of the market, are
driven by shareholders to deliver ever-increasing profits lest
they risk irrelevance. As such, they market foods to us
explicitly designed to create insatiable addiction. On the
opposing front, our underfunded health-care system and
scientific research apparatus are stuck playing catch-up,
doling out advice and policy that however well intentioned
is subject to innumerable biases—from innocuous errors of
thought to outright corruption via industry-funded studies
and scientific careers dependent on private-interest funding.
It’s no wonder that even well-educated people are
confused when it comes to nutrition. One day we’re told to
avoid butter, the next that we may as well drink it. On a
Monday we hear that physical activity is the best way to lose
weight, only to learn by Friday that its impact on our
waistline is marginal compared to diet. We are told over and
over again that whole grains are the key to a healthy heart,
but is heart disease really caused by a deficiency of morning
oatmeal? Blogs and traditional news media alike attempt to
cover new science, but their coverage (and sensational
headlines) often seems more intent on driving hits to their
websites than informing the public.
Our physicians, nutritionists, and even the government
all have their say, and yet they are consciously and
subconsciously influenced by powers beyond the naked
eye. How can you possibly know who and what to trust
when so much is at stake?