When twenty-seven year old Henry M. entered the hospital in 1953 for radical brain surgery that was supposed to cure his epilepsy, he was hopeful that the procedure would change his life for the better. Instead, it trapped him in a mental time warp where TV is always a new invention and Truman is forever…
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One of our goals here at Posit Science is to make BrainHQ the best brain training program in the world. To do that, we have worked with hundreds of scientists, making sure our scientific foundation, design, and research is top notch. But there’s another group of people that’s equally important to listen to: people who…
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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…
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An article on Science Daily talked about a science publication by researchers from Florida State University who examined how technology is being used by senior citizens. The researchers refer to computer-based brain fitness programs and make the following statement: “There is limited but encouraging evidence that these so-called brain fitness software packages make a difference…
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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.
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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.
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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…
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Sometimes when I read science news, it seems as though the world is moving incredibly quickly. I see stories about gene editing, stem cells, and cloning…and I think, “what time to be alive!” But usually just a bit later, I read more science news, and it seems like the world is moving incredible slowly. We…
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Preventing Dementia Bilingual adults with Alzheimer’s take twice as long to develop symptoms as their monolingual counterparts. The mean age for the first signs of dementia in monolingual adults is 71.4 and for bilingual it is 75.5. Focusing on Tasks Bilingual people display increased concentration on their assignments over their monolingual counterparts. They are more…
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Introduction: Piaget and His Ideas A young child passes a fence with a cow standing nearby and gleefully exclaims: “Dog!” Another child examines a row of seven checkers. When the seven checkers are spread out to form a longer row, the child claims that there are now “more” checkers. Children have very different ideas about…
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