The Neurogenesis Project

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The Neurogenesis Project

Optimize and Enhance your Brain Function and Cognitive Capacity for a healthier, happier, and more productive life. Contact us for a consultation.

Precision-based, personalized, and proactive Brain Health care.

08/26/2026

What if the sober months are not the safe ones?

A new study in Molecular Psychiatry followed mice through drinking, twenty-eight days of forced abstinence, and then a test where the alcohol was made progressively bitter. Mice that went through abstinence were more willing to keep drinking through that bitter taste than mice trained without it. Their plain alcohol intake did not go up. Their tolerance for drinking through som**hing unpleasant did.

It is a mouse study, and the authors are clear that causality was not established. But it lines up with som**hing clinicians see constantly: the person who relapses at month three, after everyone had stopped worrying.

Dr. Drew Edwards writes about what that should change in how we plan care after discharge.

Created with AI assistance.

https://neurogenesisproject.com/blog/alcohol-abstinence-bnst-compulsive-drinking

Has anyone in your life relapsed during a stretch when things seemed to be going well?

08/21/2026

Does walking 15,000 steps at work count as exercise for your brain?

A meta-analysis of 4.2 million adults, published this week in The Lancet Public Health, says probably not. Leisure-time exercise was linked to a 24% lower risk of dementia. Physical activity done as part of a job was linked to a 20% higher risk.

The researchers do not think movement at work harms neurons. They think physically demanding jobs come bundled with stress, poor sleep, noise, air pollution, and little control over your own hours, and that those are what show up in the numbers.

Dr. Sean Orr breaks down what the study found, what it does not prove, and what to actually do with it: https://neurogenesisproject.com/blog/exercise-paradox-dementia-risk-work-vs-leisure

Created with AI assistance.

Do you count your job as your workout?

08/19/2026

Why do people who grew up in chaos so often struggle harder with addiction and stress as adults?

A new study in Neuron just found a physical answer. Early-life stress leaves a measurable mark on how DNA is packaged inside dopamine neurons, the brain cells at the center of reward and craving. The mark keeps stress-response genes switched to a hair trigger well into adulthood. When researchers blocked the process in mice, the lifelong vulnerability never developed.

Dr. Drew Edwards explains what this means for anyone in recovery who carries childhood trauma, and what to ask any treatment program before you commit: https://neurogenesisproject.com/blog/childhood-trauma-scar-dopamine-neurons

Created with AI assistance.

Do you think addiction treatment takes childhood history seriously enough?

08/13/2026

Why do people on Ozempic suddenly lose interest in drinking?

Scientists may have finally found the answer, and it lives in a brain region most people have never heard of. The lateral septum sits between the memory system and the reward system, and it is packed with GLP-1 receptors. New research in the journal Neuron mapped how GLP-1 drugs activate this region to put a brake on alcohol-driven dopamine release.

Dr. Drew Edwards breaks down what this means for anyone in recovery, and for the families who love them: craving is circuitry, not a character flaw.

Read more: https://neurogenesisproject.com/blog/lateral-septum-craving-center-glp1

Have you or someone you know noticed changes in cravings on a GLP-1 medication? We would like to hear about it in the comments.

07/31/2026

Two groups of women lost about the same 15 pounds on the same calorie deficit. Only one group got measurably better at planning and problem-solving.

The difference was when they ate. One group compressed meals into about 8 hours a day, roughly 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and stopped eating four hours before bed. The other ate across a normal 12-hour day. Six months later the scale said the same thing about both groups, and the cognitive tests did not.

Dr. Sean Orr walks through the mechanisms he thinks are most likely, including why a nine-thirty dinner hits your blood sugar harder than the identical meal at one in the afternoon, and he is candid about where this new Rutgers trial stops short. It is 47 women, presented as a conference abstract, and everyone in it was actively losing weight.

https://neurogenesisproject.com/blog/eating-window-cognition-weight-loss-trial

What time do you finish dinner most nights?

07/21/2026

Why can't most people tell when their own thinking has started to slip?

Because the brain regions that monitor your cognitive function are the same ones that degrade first under chronic stress. As your capacity declines, your ability to notice the decline declines with it. Patients in early burnout consistently report feeling fine while objective testing shows otherwise. Their families notice. Their colleagues notice. They don't.

That's one reason we wrote a full clinical definition of what we call the Neuroeconomy: the economy where cognitive capacity, not muscle, determines what you can produce.

https://neurogenesisproject.com/blog/what-is-the-neuroeconomy

When was the last time anything in your chart actually measured how your brain is working?

07/17/2026

What if the drug quieting alcohol cravings was never designed for addiction at all?

A new Lancet trial found once-weekly semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy) cut heavy drinking days by 41% in people with alcohol use disorder. The reason lives in the brain's reward circuit, the same wiring alcohol hijacks. Patients kept describing the same thing: they just thought about drinking less.

Dr. Drew Edwards breaks down the science, and the limits, of what this means for recovery: https://neurogenesisproject.com/blog/semaglutide-alcohol-cravings-brain-reward

If addiction is a brain disease and not a character flaw, how much of the shame we've built around it was misplaced from the start?

07/12/2026

What if schizophrenia was never really a "dopamine disease"?

New imaging and immune research has rewritten the biology. Dopamine turns out to be the last step in the chain, not the first, and in many patients the illness starts as neuroinflammation, with IL-6 rising years before the first symptom. That reframe is already producing new treatments, including the first antipsychotic in seven decades that doesn't block dopamine at all.

Dr. Sean Orr breaks down what the new science means for anyone facing a diagnosis: https://neurogenesisproject.com/blog/schizophrenia-immune-dopamine-new-treatments

If someone you love has been told a diagnosis is fixed, what would it change to hear it's biology we're learning to treat?

07/11/2026

Why does willpower fail so reliably in addiction? A new brain-imaging meta-analysis has an answer, and it isn't about character.

Researchers pooled 53 fMRI studies of 1,700 people addicted to nine different substances. Whether the drug was alcohol, he**in, ni****ne, or m**h, the same reward circuit was miswired the same way. The "want this" signal got louder. The "not now" signal got quieter. The wiring even predicted how impulsive each person was.

Dr. Drew Edwards breaks down what this means for how we treat addiction, and why a scan that looks like a life sentence is really a target.

Read it here: https://neurogenesisproject.com/blog/universal-brain-signature-addiction-reward-circuit

If you've watched someone relapse and wondered why "just stop" never worked, what would it change to know the answer is in the wiring?

07/03/2026

What if "getting older means losing your edge" is just wrong?

A new three-year study tracked 3,966 adults from age 19 to 94 doing a few minutes of brain training a day. Brain health improved at every age, even into the 80s. And the people who started the lowest gained the most.

The variable that mattered wasn't age or education. It was whether you showed up and did the work.

Full article from Dr. Sean C. Orr, M.D.: https://neurogenesisproject.com/blog/brain-improves-any-age-brainhealth-study

Have you noticed your focus changing with age, for better or worse? What did you do about it?

Address

6320 St. Augustine Road, Suite 7B
Jacksonville, FL
32217

Website

http://www.neurogenesisproject.com/, https://patreon.com/TheNeurogenesisProject

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