What does 'develop whiplash' mean here? Flash forward just a couple of decades to today and you could almost develop whiplash from the progress being made toward the understanding of our brains—both how we can protect them and how we can enhance them. Take the developments in the field of Alzheimer’s disease research. Alzheimer’s is a devastating neurodegenerative condition affecting more than five million people in the United States (with numbers expected to triple in the coming years); it is only recently that diet was thought to have any impact on the disease at all. In fact, though the disease was first described in 1906 by German physician Alois Alzheimer, 90 percent of what we know about the condition has been discovered in just the last fifteen years.