Happy New Year! By now, most of us are settling into 2022 and thinking about the year ahead of us—and what we can do to make the best of it. Many of us are having a tough start to the year. We’re entering the twentieth month of the COVID crisis. The winter omicron variant surge…
BrainHQ is an evidence-based brain training program. That means that it has been used in many gold-standard clinical trials – and been proven to help people think faster, focus better, and remember more (you can have a look at our science results page here). However, most of these clinical trials have been conducted in healthy…
We’ve all had the experience of our minds getting a bit stuck on a topic – chewing it over, turning it over, and unable to let it go. Psychologists call this process “ruminating” – and while it can be helpful for a short period of time if all this thinking gives us a new perspective…
I watched the new PBS show called Brain Secrets in which our own founder, Dr. Mike Merzenich, is featured. One of the everyday examples of brain fitness Dr. Mike mentions is how older people can avoid falling down by training their brains to keep their head upright when they walk. Older people have more fear…
I read an interesting science paper published in the Journal of Gerontology. Dr. Sheila West and her colleagues from Johns Hopkins University asked older drivers to volunteer to have their cars rigged with cameras and GPS systems to monitor their driving over a five-day period. They recruited 1,425 drivers aged 67 to 85. Specifically the…
Cognitive ability is a critical measure of safe driving … understanding that point the way toward improving our ability to deal with the many distractions beyond texting that we can’t eliminate or legislate.
I am disappointed that distracted driving has been myopically defined as “texting while driving” … we are missing an opportunity to make a dent in the 6 million annual crashes in the US.
Brain training works! Brain training doesn’t work! Every week, I see a new headline in the news about brain training, and they reliably go back and forth between these two extremes like the tick-tock of a clock. Why the back and forth? If a study shows that brain training works in one week, how can…
An interesting paper came across my radar week – “Placebo effects in cognitive training” published in PNAS (with a paywall, unfortunately). In this paper, the authors investigate the effect that people’s expectations might have on the results of brain-training experiments. Every research study needs to recruit people to participate, and a common way is to…
Posit Science’s very own Dr. Michael Merzenich has been awarded the 2016 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience for his work in discovering adult brain plasticity and applying its principles to improve the human condition! The Kavli Prize––a partnership between The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, The Kavli Foundation, and The Norwegian Ministry of Education and…