Brain Portfolio
Understand Your Brain’s Strengths, Reveal Its Gaps, and Chart your Path to Become Sharper
To build a brain that stays sharp, resilient, and youthful with age, you first need to look within—understanding your unique strengths, vulnerabilities, and daily habits that shape how your brain functions. Your brain’s vitality is deeply connected to what happens in the rest of your body, your mindset, and your environment. That’s why it’s essential to take inventory of both your brain and body’s chemistry, physiology, and lifestyle patterns.
In The Invincible Brain, you’ll discover a powerful set of self-assessments—your Brain Portfolio—designed to give you a detailed snapshot of your current brain health. These tools help you identify what’s working well and what needs attention, while pointing you toward evidence-based strategies to rebuild, rejuvenate, and optimize your brain performance.
The eight sections of the Brain Portfolio help you chart a personalized roadmap toward sharper focus, stronger memory, and emotional balance. They include targeted questionnaires and recommended blood tests that evaluate your fitness, sleep, stress levels, and key biomarkers of brain health.
Below are a few sections of the Brain Portfolio, taken from The Invincible Brain:
VO₂ Max: A Window Into Your Brain and Body Fitness
Your VO₂ max is a measure of how efficiently your body uses oxygen during exercise—it reflects the maximum amount of oxygen your heart, lungs, and muscles can deliver and utilize. Think of it as your body’s horsepower. A higher VO₂ max means your heart pumps more effectively, your blood delivers oxygen more efficiently, and your muscles and brain receive the energy they need to perform at their best. Research shows that people with higher VO₂ max scores tend to have better memory, focus, and overall brain health, since oxygen-rich blood flow nourishes neurons and supports neuroplasticity.
Improving your VO₂ max through regular aerobic exercise—such as brisk walking, running, cycling, or swimming—can strengthen both your heart and your brain. You don’t need a laboratory test to estimate your level; there are simple ways to approximate it using basic fitness data.
Example 1: The Rockport Walking Test
Walk one mile as briskly as you can while maintaining a steady pace. Record your time (in minutes), your heart rate immediately after finishing (beats per minute), your weight (in pounds), and your age. Then use the Rockport formula:
VO₂ max = 132.853 − (0.0769 × weight) − (0.3877 × age) + (6.315 × gender) − (3.2649 × time) − (0.1565 × heart rate)
For gender, use 1 for males and 0 for females. This gives a good estimate of your aerobic fitness and how well your cardiovascular system supports brain and body function.
Example 2: Two-Mile Walk or Run Test
If you prefer running, record how long it takes you to complete two miles at your best sustainable pace. The faster your time (and the lower your ending heart rate), the higher your VO₂ max. For most people, even tracking improvement over time—without using a formula—provides valuable insight into growing endurance and stamina.
Brain Fitness Calculator
Based on my knowledge of all the common factors affecting a person’s brain functions, I developed a five-minute screening tool called the Brain Fitness Calculator that anyone can take and score. This calculator focuses on what I believe to be the most essential brain care elements, to demonstrate to you how well you are taking care of your brain now, so you can assess what to work on during the twelve-week program. The score from this assessment can incentivize you to become proactive in building a stronger brain and appreciate how simple tweaks in your daily activities can reshape your brain for decades to come.
For each item, 1 is “low,” and 5 is “high.” Add up your scores and write it down.
How to interpret your Brain Fitness score:
Green zone: 60–75
Good job, keep it up! It appears that you have already addressed many of the factors that can affect your brain. Now, you can improve your great results and go for an A+.
Yellow zone: 45–59
Your brain needs some work. You will benefit greatly from completing my Brain Fitness Program and should see great results quickly.
Red zone: 15–44
You are reporting noticeable problems, which could be due to depression, poor health habits, lack of sleep, uncontrolled medical conditions, or chronic stress. I recommend you start working on your lifestyle habits as soon as possible and complete every step of my Brain Fitness Program diligently. Also, please make an appointment with your doctor for a general workup and complete assessment. The problem is likely simple and treatable. You do not want to walk around with a series of treatable conditions that are shrinking your brain.
Neurocognitive and Neurobehavioral Spidograms
The following two assessments aim to help you identify what specific brain-related issues you may suffer and how severe they are. Fill out these spidograms depicting neurocognitive and neurobehavioral symptoms on a scale of 1 to 10, with zero being “no problem” and 10 being “a major issue that impacts my life.” The outer three circles represent severe symptoms. The middle three circles represent moderate symptoms. The inner four circles are minimal. Your results depict where you stand now with regard to your neurocognitive and neurobehavioral symptoms. To determine the weight of your cognitive symptom load, you must add the numbers you circled for each of the fifteen items in the neurocognitive spidogram.
- Green zone: scores below 74
- Yellow zone: scores between 75 to 119
- Red zone: scores above 120
To determine the weight of your emotional/behavioral symptom load, add the scores for each of the twenty items in the neurobehavioral spidogram. You can use these numbers to assess the total weight of your neurocognitive and neurobehavioral symptoms. You can monitor your improvement after six weeks and again after twelve weeks.
- Green zone: scores below 99
- Yellow zone: scores between 100-159
- Red zone: scores above 160