Join Our Customer Council
If you like to try new things and put your stamp on them, sign up for our Customer Council today! We invite council members to give us feedback on new ideas and exercises so that we can deliver the best possible experience. Non-customers are welcome, too. We look forward to hearing from and working with you!
A Brain-Healthy Holiday Gift Guide for All Budgets
We’ve put together a gift guide of our favorite brain-healthy products from $5 to $500. You might be surprised what you find in there (curry powder? tango lessons?) and even learn a thing or two about keeping your own brain in shape. Go now >>
Step Aside, Freud: A New Interpretation of Dreaming
Many well-known thinkers have hypothesized that dreams serve a psychological purpose, giving us a view into our emotions or unconscious. But a recently published paper from a leading Harvard psychologist argues that dreams might be serve a very different purpose: to “warm up” the brain’s circuits for everything we will hear, see, and otherwise sense in the day ahead. Find out more.
New Brain Games!
Check out our new Brain Games page! We have five fun, free games up—including the brand-new Farmer’s Memory Challenge. If you enjoy these games, pass the link along to your friends! Go now >>
A Brain that Keeps On Teaching
Henry Molaison is a well known figure in neuroscience, though until recently he was known only as “H.M.” After undergoing experimental brain surgery in the 1950s, H.M. lost the ability to form new memories. He spent his life allowing scientists to learn from his unique brain—and now, through the miracle of modern technology, continues to do the same in death. Find out how.
Food and Mood
We already know that certain foods are good for brain fitness (you can learn more in our Brain Healthy Recipe Guide). Now, scientists are uncovering how nutrients may impact mood and mental illness. Find out what foods might help people fight anxiety, lower stress, reduce suicidal thoughts, and much more. Go now >>
Is the Key to Parkinson’s in the Stomach?
Researchers at Yale have discovered that ghrelin—a hormone produced in the stomach—might be used to help Parkinson’s patients. How? By protecting the very brain cells that degenerate in Parkinson’s disease. Learn more.
Young Brains and Criminal Behavior
Recent research suggests that the prefrontal cortex—an area of the brain responsible for complex decision-making, planning, and measuring risk—doesn’t reach maturity in many people until their late teens or early 20s. How does this research help us understand juvenile crime and impact the debate on trying juvenile criminals as adults? Find one perspective in this interview with developmental psychologist Laurence Steinberg.
Book of the Month
The Chemical Carousel: What Science Tells Us About Beating Addiction (2009)
By Dirk Hanson
In The Chemical Carousel, science writer Dirk Hanson takes readers through the neuroscience of addiction—to alcohol, drugs, tobacco, and even food. He sheds light on how neurochemicals present in everyone’s brains interact with biochemical individuality to facilitate addiction in certain people. Ultimately, he concludes that addiction is a disease that should treated rather than criminalized. Written in a lay-friendly, easy-to-read style , The Chemical Carousel a worthwhile book for anyone interested in why it’s so hard for addicts to avoid destructive behaviors. Learn more.
This newsletter contains public reports of studies which our scientists found to be of interest; no other representation is made with respect to such reports. While study results are informative, Posit Science reminds people that individual results will vary. Posit Science does not recommend its products for the treatment of disease; such treatment should be under the direction of an appropriate health professional. Some or all of this newsletter may constitute an advertisement for certain purposes.
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Dr. Mike Merzenich 
