Prologue: The Five Digits I Couldn't Remember

A sample chapter from Huna Makia — Energy Flows Where Attention Goes

The gas station was empty, which was mercy, because I stood at the pump for a long time.

Card inserted. Screen blinking. Please enter ZIP code.

Five digits. The ZIP code of the house I had lived in for years. The number I had typed a thousand times, at this exact pump, without ever once thinking about it. My thumb hovered over the keypad and — nothing. Not a blank where the number used to be. Something worse: the certainty that I knew it, sitting just behind a wall I could not reach. I could feel its shape. I could not find its face.

I stood there, forty-five years old, a man who had designed guidance systems at MIT, who had built an artificial-intelligence company, who had once held whole architectures of code in his head — and I could not remember my own ZIP code to buy gasoline.

That was the moment I stopped being able to pretend.

For months I had been telling myself a story: that I was tired, that I was stressed, that the fog would lift on its own if I just pushed a little harder. The story ended at that keypad. Because you can talk yourself out of fatigue. You cannot talk yourself out of a number that has fallen out of your own mind.

I had survived COVID-19. The fever broke; the cough faded; I counted myself lucky. My friend Ram had not been lucky — he died in a hospital an ocean away, and I will tell you about him. I walked away breathing. But something had stayed behind in me after the virus left. A fog that sleep couldn’t touch. A fatigue that turned a flight of stairs into a negotiation. A brain that had always been my most reliable tool, and suddenly wasn’t.

It would take me nearly five years to find my way out. This book is the map I wish someone had handed me at that pump.

Here is what I learned, compressed into a single sentence: the fog is an energy problem, and you have more power over your energy than anyone told you. Not willpower. Not positive thinking. Energy — the real, physical kind, the kind your cells manufacture every second of your life, the kind that either reaches your brain or doesn’t. I learned to route more of it back to my mind. I did it with an ancient Hawaiian principle for a compass, artificial intelligence for a research partner, and the stubborn belief that a solution existed even when I couldn’t see it.

In June 2021, I rated my brain fog a 9 out of 10. I couldn’t write an email. I shut down my company.

In January 2026, I rate it a 3. I work full days. I run. I ski black-diamond runs with my daughter. I wrote this book.

The distance between those two numbers is what these pages are about. I can’t promise you’ll travel it as I did — your biology is your own. But I can promise you’ll finish this book with something I didn’t have at that gas station: a method, a mechanism, and a reason for hope that is grounded in science rather than wishing.

Let’s begin.

This is a sample chapter from Huna Makia: Energy Flows Where Attention Goes — a complete book currently seeking a publisher. Subscribe below to be the first to know when it launches, and get the free one-page Quick-Start Protocol as a welcome.

© 2026 Anand Karasi. All rights reserved.