Evaluating a Brain-Fitness Program
When evaluating any scientific or medical product for something as important as your brain, it’s a good idea to learn about the program’s design and effectiveness before committing to it.
When choosing to a brain fitness program, we recommend you ask these key questions:
- Who designed the program? What are their credentials?
- Which organizations collaborate with or support the company’s work?
- Has the program been tested in rigorous scientific studies?
- Is the program proven effective?
We believe Posit Science can give stronger answers to these questions than any other company out there. But brain fitness is an important issue, and we encourage you to conduct your own research to find the program that’s right for you.
Who designed the program? What are their credentials?
Posit Science works with a consulting team of more than 50 scientists from leading institutions around the world. (Think Cambridge, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Johns Hopkins….) We also have several PhDs on staff. This team is led by renowned neuroscientist Michael Merzenich, who holds an endowed research chair at the University of California at San Francisco and is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences.
We have invested in this large science team because the brain is an exceptionally complicated organ. Each scientist lends his or her own special expertise to give us a uniquely robust understanding of the brain.
Which organizations collaborate with or support the company’s work?
Here’s a partial list:
- The National Institutes of Health (NIH) have given us grants worth millions of dollars to continue our research.
- Mayo Clinic, Stanford University, and the University of California at San Francisco are just a few of the prestigious institutions collaborating with Posit Science to study the effects of the Brain Fitness Program. A complete list can be found here.
- Humana, one of the nation’s largest insurers, is offering the Brain Fitness Program to its 4+ million Medicare customers.
- More than 150 residential communities, including all Leisure Care communities, offer Brain Fitness Program classes to residents.
Has the program been tested in rigorous scientific studies?
To our knowledge, we have committed to more studies of the Brain Fitness Program, in conjunction with more universities, than any other brain fitness company. We hold ourselves and our partners to the highest ethical standards in all these studies.
Is the program proven effective?
Study results show that the program works. As published in the prestigious scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the program improves memory 10+ years on average. It also significantly speeds up brain processing. These results are impressive in part because they indicate that the program effects more than just the tasks it specifically trains—instead, results “generalize” to important quality-of-life benefits. And the gains endure even after training ends.
How Do I Know What Works?
It can be hard to figure out which products that claim to enhance brain function are most effective.