The past month has been tough. All across the world, people have been asked to stay home and socially isolate themselves to protect themselves and their communities against the spread of the COVID19 pandemic. At Posit Science, we’ve all been working from home for five weeks now, sheltering in place with our families or roommates,…
For decades, we’ve been waiting on the scientific community to find a cure for Alzheimer’s—but very little progress has been made. The first drug used to treat the symptoms of Alzheimer’s was Cognex (tacrine), which was approved in 1993; and the most recent was Namenda (memantine), approved in 2003. That means that in the past…
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…
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…
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…
How many of us were told by our moms and dads when we were young that “good things come to those who wait?” But sometimes that wait can seem like forever… This week, that advice came true for a pioneering group of scientists—and it took more than twenty years. Time Magazine just announced its special…
When I was in college, I took a lot of science courses. Really, a lot — maybe even too many. And mostly what they taught me was how scientists believed the world worked — right then, as of the early 1990’s. Luckily for me, my college roommate took a somewhat broader curriculum, and much to my benefit, we talked…
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…
