The term “cognitive function” refers to the overall processing power of the brain, also called “mental performance”. Nearly all of the ingredients in Z support an increase in cognitive function.

Concentration refers to your ability to keep your spotlight of attention narrowly focused on a single thread of thought without being hijacked by unrelated thoughts.

Increasing your power of concentration and focus facilitates productivity and greater capacity for deep work.

Maintaining intense focus is one of the two conditions that must be met to trigger neuroplasticity. 

Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to reorganize and restructure its connections in response to learning.

As young children, we have the highest level of neuroplasticity, and it tends to decrease with age.  This is why it’s possible to learn to speak another language without an accent providing that the process started early enough in life.

Adults of all ages are capable of neuroplasticity.  Triggering it requires that two conditions are met simultaneously: (1) the brain is in a state of high alertness, and (2) attention is narrowly and intensely focused on the material to be learned.

These two conditions are associated with the release of two neurotransmitters: (1) noradrenaline, which stimulates alertness and (2) acetylcholine, which stimulates focus (providing that a conscious and deliberate effort to focus is made).

A third neurotransmitter, dopamine, can enhance depth of focus.

Z increases levels of all three of these neurotransmitters, which stimulates neuroplasticity.

Motivation and drive refer to our level of desire to take action, especially when the action does not deliver an immediate reward.

Dopamine is the brain’s molecule of motivation.  Z increases your baseline level of dopamine, which supports increased motivation.

It is still critical that you push yourself to take action, whether or not you feel motivated at first.  The feeling of making progress (which comes as a result of action) is essential to motivation.

Mood is a highly subjective sense of our current state of mind and overall emotional condition.

In addition to the obvious benefits of being in a good mood, research by psychologist Shawn Achor has shown that overall brain performance increases by 31% when in a positive mood, compared with neutral or negative.

The general term “memory” refers to the brains’ ability to store, retain and retrieve facts, ideas, associations, procedures, and sensory information.

Improving memory means that we can more effectively perform these functions—both on the front end (encoding) and the back end (recall).

As memory improves, we are better able to encode information, store a larger quantity of information, retain it for longer periods and recall it more easily.

In physics, “energy” refers to the ability to do work.  In human terms, it is our subjective level of readiness to take action—whether physical or mental.

Energy has two components: (1) mental energy—our level of alertness, also known as autonomic arousal, and (2) physical energy—our capacity to perform physical activity.

“Stress” is the subjective experience of mental or emotional strain. It typically includes anxiety or fear, although many people (especially highly-driven achievers) will not consciously recognize those underlying emotions.

Stress is associated with an increase in autonomic arousal (alertness) beyond a level that feels comfortable, but the same level of alertness may be perceived as stress or excitement, depending on whether the subjective experience of the feeling is negative or positive.

Reducing stress means that the current state of autonomic arousal is less likely to be subjectively experienced as negative.

Like every other organ in the body, the brain is human tissue that functions best when it is healthy and vibrant.  While there is not yet a consensus in the scientific community about what measures constitute the key indicators of brain health, some contenders are (i) cerebral blood flow, (ii) overall levels of neural activity, and (iii) performance on cognitive tasks.

Neurogenesis is the process by which new neurons are formed in the brain. This takes place during the development of an embryo and throughout childhood.  In the 1990s, scientists discovered that neurogenesis takes place in the brains of adults.

During this process, neural stem cells (basically “newborn brain cells”) form and then adapt based on their location in the brain.

Neurogenesis is believed to play a key role in learning, memory and mood regulation.