Why Some People Think Faster Than You

Key Takeaways

• Lion's Mane compounds erinacine A and erinacine S promoted oligodendrocyte maturation and increased myelin basic protein expression — published in Scientific Reports (Nature Publishing Group).
• Myelin can increase nerve signal speed up to 100x — from 0.5 m/s unmyelinated to 120 m/s fully myelinated. That gap is the difference between dial-up and fiber-optic.
• The effects were observed in the corpus callosum — the primary highway connecting your brain's two hemispheres, critical for integrating analytical and creative thinking.
• Myelin naturally deteriorates with age — making active support increasingly important the further into your career you go.

Why This Matters for You

Raw intelligence is table stakes at the top. What separates elite performers isn't how much they know — it's how fast they can access and deploy it. In a negotiation, a crisis, a high-stakes presentation — the person whose signals travel faster has the edge. Myelin is that advantage at the biological level. And a study published in Nature's Scientific Reports shows Lion's Mane promotes its growth.

There is a reason some people seem to think faster than others. It is not purely about intelligence. It is about infrastructure -- specifically, the biological insulation that determines how quickly electrical signals travel through the brain.

That insulation is called myelin. And a study published in Scientific Reports (Nature Publishing Group) demonstrated that Lion's Mane promotes its growth.

Myelin: The Broadband of Your Nervous System

Every thought, decision, and reaction you have is an electrical signal traveling along nerve fibers. The speed of that signal depends on myelin -- a fatty sheath that wraps around nerve fibers the way insulation wraps around an electrical wire.

Without myelin, nerve signals travel at roughly 0.5 to 2 meters per second. With full myelination, the same signals can travel at up to 120 meters per second -- nearly 100 times faster. The difference between a myelinated and unmyelinated nerve fiber is the difference between dial-up and fiber-optic internet.

Myelin is produced by specialized brain cells called oligodendrocytes. These cells wrap themselves around nerve fibers in concentric layers, creating the insulating sheath that enables rapid signal transmission. More oligodendrocytes means more myelin. More myelin means faster thinking.

The Nature Study: Huang et al., 2021

The study, led by Chia-Wei Huang and published in Scientific Reports (part of the Nature Publishing Group), examined the effect of Lion's Mane mycelium on myelination using both laboratory tissue cultures and living animal models.

The research focused on two specific Lion's Mane compounds: erinacine A (HeA) and erinacine S (HeS) -- both derived from the mushroom's mycelium.

The findings were unambiguous:

• HeA and HeS more potently stimulated the expression of myelin basic protein (MBP) in oligodendrocytes. MBP is the primary structural component of myelin -- increasing its production means increasing the raw material for myelin formation.
• The compounds increased the number of oligodendrocytes -- the cells that produce myelin. More builders means more insulation.
• The overlap between MBP immunoreactivity and neuronal fibers was significantly increased in the presence of HeA and HeS, indicating that the myelin was not just being produced but was actively wrapping around nerve fibers where it functions.
• In live animals, daily oral administration of Lion's Mane mycelium to neonatal rat pups for seven days enhanced MBP expression and oligodendrocyte density in the corpus callosum -- the massive bundle of nerve fibers that connects the brain's two hemispheres.

The corpus callosum is not a peripheral structure. It is the primary communication highway between your brain's left and right hemispheres. Enhancing myelination there means improving the speed and quality of cross-hemispheric communication -- the kind of integrated thinking that allows analytical reasoning to work alongside creative insight.

Why Processing Speed Separates Leaders from Followers

In executive environments, raw intelligence is table stakes. What separates high-performing leaders is the speed at which they can deploy that intelligence:

• In negotiations, the executive who processes implications faster controls the conversation.
• In crisis management, the leader who synthesizes information most quickly makes the first and best decision.
• In strategic planning, the ability to rapidly context-switch between financial, operational, and competitive data streams determines the quality of the resulting strategy.
• In everyday leadership, the capacity to absorb a briefing, identify the key issue, and respond with a clear directive -- all in real time -- is what the people around you experience as decisiveness.

All of these capacities depend on how fast signals travel through neural circuits. That speed depends on myelin. And the Huang study demonstrates that Lion's Mane promotes myelination at both the cellular and structural levels.

The Age Factor

Myelin naturally deteriorates with age -- a process called demyelination. This is one of the primary biological mechanisms behind the cognitive slowing that most people experience from their 50s onward. Tasks that once felt effortless begin to require more concentration. Mental processing that was once instant develops a perceptible lag.

The Huang study, published in Scientific Reports (Nature Publishing Group) -- one of science's most rigorously peer-reviewed venues -- introduces the possibility of an active approach: supporting the brain's myelin-producing cells through dietary supplementation. For executives in the second half of their careers, when experience and judgment are at their peak but neural transmission speed may be declining, maintaining myelination is the biological requirement for continuing to operate at the level their position demands.

Investing in Transmission Speed

NTRL's Executive's Coffee contains 300mg of Lion's Mane per capsule -- the same species (Hericium erinaceus) whose mycelium-derived compounds erinacine A and erinacine S produced the myelination results in the Huang study. While the clinical implications for healthy humans are still being studied, the biological mechanism is clear and published in one of science's most respected journals.

For professionals whose competitive edge depends on speed of thought, the question is worth considering: what are you doing to maintain the infrastructure that makes fast thinking possible?

Source: Huang CW, et al. "Hericium erinaceus mycelium and its small bioactive compounds promote oligodendrocyte maturation with an increase in myelin basic protein." Scientific Reports. 2021;11:6551. [PMC7985201](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7985201/)