At first glance, the lobby of Michael Merzenich’s headquarters in downtown San Francisco looks like a dentist’s office, with couches, a coffee table, some glossy magazines, and a potted orchid. But spend a little time and you may begin to piece together what his business is really all about. Sitting on top of the magazines is a pack of Mensa cards—a deck containing questions to determine whether someone is a genius or merely intelligent. One wall is covered with patents. And another is plastered with news clippings about Merzenich’s “brain gym.”

                              

Merzenich, a professor in the Keck Center for Integrative Neurosciences at the University of California, San Francisco, is a pioneer in the field of brain plasticity, or the study of the brain’s lifelong ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections. About 10 years ago, he started Scientific Learning, a company that manufactures software to help children with learning disabilities. Launched on a shoestring, the Oakland, California-based outfit now boasts $48 million in annual sales. His latest company, Posit Science, makes the Brain Fitness Program, a computer program for older brains designed to sharpen skills and improve memory. Since its founding in 2003, Posit Science has sold tens of thousands of copies of the program at $395 each. 

 

But colleagues agree that it’s never been the money that drives Merzenich. He measures success in a different way. What Merzenich seeks to do is keep peoples’ brains as toned and honed as they can be—and changing the brain is possible whether someone is in their early teens or late 90s, he says. Helping people learn something new—a new skill like speaking Italian, say, or dancing salsa—actually alters the brain physically, strengthening neurons and laying down new pathways for neural communication.

 

“We can use this resource for correction, for assisting somebody that is a little bit or maybe a lot in trouble,” says Merzenich, who is Posit Science’s chief scientific officer. “So that’s what we’re trying to do, to marshal this powerful force to help people, to drive their brains correctively.”

 

Merzenich’s research, as well as his work at Posit Science, has sharply challenged the view that only very young brains are able to adapt and recover from injury or illness. A recent clinical trial involving users of his Brain Fitness over a period of eight weeks found that participants improved their brain processing speed by more than 131 percent, meaning that the brain was more than twice as fast at taking in and processing information such as speech. What’s more, memory improved so much that this function was comparable to that of people 10 years younger.

 

The program consists of six computer exercises. One includes requiring users to figure out whether the pitch of a tone goes up or down, another is a sound matching game, and yet another asks them to follow directions in order to move objects around on the screen.