花钱能买到更好的大脑吗？奢华康养盯上脑健康，但证据还没跟上

November 3, 2026

MRI scans of a human brain.Photo: Getty Images

We’ve spent years optimizing everything from our glucose levels and gut microbiomes to our sleep scores and biological ages. Full-body MRIs, smart rings and an arsenal of light therapies have turned our bodies into wired-up machines for monitoring, measuring and fine-tuning. But what about the organ responsible for making sense of it all? As anxieties mount over how a life spent online — and increasingly outsourced to AI — is eroding our ability to think, wellness has a new obsession: the brain.

As with so many wellness tech trends, the Kardashians were ahead of the curve. In a 2022 episode of The Kardashians, Kendall Jenner took Khloé to Amen Clinics for a SPECT scan, a type of imaging that measures blood flow in the brain. Her results were interpreted as revealing anxiety and the effects of past emotional trauma. At the time, it seemed over the top, a scientifically contentious form of indulgent self-examination, most fitting for people with money to burn.

Now, brain health is moving beyond celebrity curiosity and into luxury wellness, from neurofeedback sessions at Mandarin Oriental Mayfair to Clinique La Prairie’s seven-day cognitive longevity program in Switzerland, costing just under CHF 30,000 ($36,000). Meanwhile, neurotechnology companies are bringing brain monitoring and stimulation into specialist clinics and at-home devices, hoping to make cognitive fitness as routine as going to the gym.

Consumers appear hungry to know more. According to McKinsey’s 2025 Future of Wellness report, 61% of respondents consider cognitive function very important, yet brain health remains one of the areas where consumer demand is going unmet. Younger consumers, especially Gen Z, reportedly feel that gap the most.

“For a long time, it was all about physical performance, having beautiful top-performing bodies as late as possible in life,” says Olga Donica, longevity innovation director at luxury longevity clinic Clinique La Prairie. “Now, we are switching to something much more advanced, complex and sophisticated, and this for sure is the brain.”

Part of the appeal lies in growing research into neuroplasticity, which has overturned the idea that the brain becomes fixed in adulthood, revealing its capacity to rewire itself and adapt throughout life. For wellness brands, it’s an enticing proposition: if they’ve built lucrative businesses helping us optimize our bodies to perform better for longer, why not our brains?

A cognitive “edge”

In June, Mandarin Oriental Mayfair added a Brain Gym residency to its wellness offering, led by Natalia Ramsden, performance psychologist and founder of Sofos Associates, a cognitive performance consultancy. The experience begins with a 75 to 90-minute brain-mapping assessment, during which clients wear a cap fitted with 24 sensors that record electrical activity as they rest and complete short cognitive tasks. The results inform personalized recommendations and, for those who want to continue, a course of 10 to 20 neurofeedback sessions, where an on-screen game responds to their brain activity in real time. Some clients return for maintenance sessions and repeat assessments. “You don’t get fit in one session at the gym, and the brain is no different,” Ramsden says.

It’s a far cry from a doctor’s office. Sessions take place in the hotel’s private residences and suites, though most bookings come from external clients rather than hotel guests — largely business leaders, founders, and entrepreneurs based around Mayfair.

“My work is with leaders, founders, and investors who are already performing well and want to keep doing so under sustained pressure,” she says. “Many come to us running on high alert. They can’t switch off, their sleep suffers, and under pressure their attention narrows when they most need to see the bigger picture.”

Ramsden calls this investment in mental performance “cognitive capital”. With longer working lives and growing dependence on technology fueling anxieties about mental sharpness, Ramsden says, her clients are getting younger, too. “We’ve spent years talking about lifespan and healthspan. Now, people are starting to talk about brainspan,” she adds. For luxury hotels, this could mean a new frontier in wellness, offering a way to build lasting relationships with affluent clients beyond the occasional stay.

Where Sofos caters to professionals hoping to maintain their mental edge, Clinique La Prairie addresses a related anxiety: what happens when that edge begins to dull with age?

Donica says the retreat’s Brain Potential program attracts predominantly affluent professionals in their late 40s to early 60s, often at the height of their careers but beginning to notice changes in their cognitive performance. They report problems with memory, stress, recovery and decision-making. “They run big companies, they own big things. So they need to be cognitively sharp,” Donica says.

Developed over two years, in collaboration with Lausanne University Hospital, the seven-day program at the clinic’s Montreux property combines brain MRI and volumetric analysis with cognitive testing, genetic screening, inflammation markers, gut microbiome analysis, and cardiovascular examinations. Guests receive a calculated “cognitive age”, with the results used to devise personalized nutrition, exercise and cognitive training plans. Each has a dedicated team of five: a doctor, nutritionist, therapist, movement expert, and guest-relations specialist. Guests leave with a personalized, three-month cognitive training plan, while follow-up assessments allow the clinic to adjust its recommendations over time.

But the ability to measure more aspects of brain health does not necessarily mean the ability to improve them. Donica says the clinic is gathering observations from guests, while acknowledging that these are not sufficient to make scientific claims about the program’s effectiveness. It’s a revealing tension: the higher the price and the more sophisticated the diagnostics, the more compelling the promise of personalization — even as evidence of lasting cognitive benefits remains limited.

A workout for the brain

At the more accessible end of the market, businesses are looking to turn brain health from an occasional luxury splurge into a regular part of consumers’ wellness routines.

London-based Naya Health, founded in 2025 by Daniel and Emily Honeywell, is among a new wave of clinics bringing brain stimulation into the wellness market. It offers repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), a non-invasive treatment that uses magnetic pulses to stimulate targeted brain regions, for clinical conditions and now also marketed toward cognitive optimization. The co-founders are bullish on the technology’s potential, touting benefits from alleviating depression, anxiety and chronic fatigue to sharpening focus, improving decision-making and boosting athletic performance.

Honeywell likens brain stimulation to physiotherapy — “a workout for the brain” — that needs to be tailored to a person’s condition, rather than administered at a fixed intensity. Rather than treating stimulation as a one-off intervention, the clinic encourages clients to return for maintenance sessions, with some executives and athletes also booking “top-up” appointments ahead of important meetings or competitions.

Currently, around 80% of Naya’s clients are seeking treatment for chronic conditions, while 20% come for optimization. Optimization sessions cost around $300, while sessions for chronic conditions cost approximately $470. Some longer treatment courses can amount to around $10,700.

“The traditional model is transactional: people feel sick, then they receive treatment,” Daniel says. “People increasingly want long-term prevention and proactive care that keeps them well, in the same way they go to the gym to maintain their physical health. In five years, asking someone about their brain health routine will be as normal as asking about their skincare.”

And it’s not just brain stimulation attracting investment. Neurotechnology company Myndspan is building a business around measuring the brain rather than treating it, offering £600 assessments using magnetoencephalography (MEG), a technology traditionally confined to hospitals and research laboratories. The scans record magnetic signals generated by neural activity, giving customers a snapshot of their brain function and an estimated cognitive age.

Co-founder and CEO Caitlin Baltzer says her longer-term ambition is to make brain scans a recurring health check rather than a specialist medical procedure. “The value today is the information it provides and the ability to build a personal history,” Baltzer says. “Demonstrating the longer-term benefit is the work ahead for us.”

Brain tech is coming for wearables

Beyond luxury hospitality and specialist clinics, dozens of neurotechnology companies are bringing brain monitoring and stimulation into everyday wearables.

Muse, the EEG (electroencephalogram, a technology that measures the brain’s electrical activity) headband maker, launched Brain Age earlier this month — a feature reminiscent of Whoop’s most popular feature, the Whoop Age — that estimates whether Muse’s 500,000 users’ brain activity appears younger or older than their biological age. Ongoing weekly assessments require a premium subscription, creating another potential revenue stream. While consumer EEG sacrifices some signal strength compared with laboratory equipment, CMO Nadia Kumentas argues that repeated measurements offer a different advantage. “In return, you get data from real life, night after night,” she says.

Neurotechnology company Neurable has embedded EEG sensors into $499 noise-canceling headphones to monitor focus and cognitive fatigue, but founder and CEO Ramses Alcaide sees greater potential in licensing the technology to other manufacturers — including mainstream wearables brands. “We believe brain sensing will eventually become a standard feature in wearables, much like heart rate and sleep tracking today,” he says.

Others are moving beyond measurement to intervention. Pulsetto, which produces neck-worn vagus nerve stimulation devices, saw revenue rise from approximately $9 million in 2024 to more than $40 million in 2025, according to co-founder and CEO Povilas Sabaliauskas. “Data on its own doesn’t change how you feel, and now, consumers need a practical way to act on all their health information,” Sabaliauskas says.

It mirrors the broader trend in the longevity tech and wellness market — after years of selling consumers information about their bodies, they’re increasingly selling interventions to change how they function. As the technology becomes more portable, and the price barrier is lowered, there are more opportunities for consumer wellness brands, as well as luxury hospitality and spas, to sell the promise of a sharper brain.

But experts warn that identifying a market is one thing; proving these products actually work is another, particularly when sophisticated neuroscience-adjacent therapeutic applications are supposedly re-packaged in consumer-grade devices for at-home use.

Isaac Treves, a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia University who studies neuroimaging, mindfulness and resilience, is particularly skeptical of consumer neurofeedback devices such as Muse. Beyond the challenges of capturing reliable EEG signals outside a laboratory, he questions whether those signals can tell us much about more subjective, complex mental states. “We don’t actually know how to predict whether you are paying attention or meditating peacefully with brain signals,” he says, arguing that “the Muse algorithm is mostly guesswork”.

“Unfortunately, the evidence base for neurofeedback devices like Muse is extremely limited, and most likely contaminated by placebo effects,” he adds.

The luxury of switching off

None of this means brain health is destined to become another discarded wellness fad. Concerns about cognitive aging are real, and Treves remains optimistic about the potential of technologies that measure and influence brain activity.

But the industry’s commercial momentum is running ahead of the evidence for some of its most ambitious claims. Treves believes increasingly personalized neuroscience, supported by larger datasets and AI, could eventually produce meaningful advances. For now, though, his advice for improving cognitive wellbeing involves no re-wiring of the brain. “Good sleep and exercise habits, good social connection, seeking out meaning in your life, and all those obvious points that our parents tell us,” he advises.

For luxury wellness and hospitality brands, the stakes are reputational. When selling a better brain, scientific credibility matters more than hyperpersonalization or luxurious surroundings.

There’s also a more uncomfortable question: whether the pursuit of brain ‘optimization’ risks becoming another demand on our already overstretched minds. “There’s a general anxiety about doing the latest thing, being the best, and capturing and quantifying everything,” says Sofos founder Ramsden. “Tracking can be very useful, but it can also backfire.”

Amy O’Brien is tech editor at Vogue Business, based in London. Before joining Vogue Business, she was a freelance journalist and content consultant, based between London and Milan. Prior, she covered fintech and Italian tech at the Financial Times’s publication Sifted. Amy has held roles at the Financial Times’s features ... Read More

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