Better Brain
A different game every day. Memory, speed, logic, language. The content changes daily so it never gets stale.
- Top in Finance
- #21
- Followers
- 39K
- Recommends
- 0
other newsletters
Growth history
Subscribers (thousands, nightly)
17K on Oct 4, 2026 → 43K on Oct 21, 2026
Followers (thousands, nightly)
Rank in Substack’s finance leaderboard: #21 today · #21 a week ago · #143 a month ago
Stats worth sharing
Tracked since Oct 4, 2026 — 41 daily snapshots so far. The card below is built from what we track and refreshes nightly.
- Percentile
- Top 4%
- Best rank seen
- #21
- Rank, 30 days
- +122 places
- Followers added
- +24K
- Posts
- 13
- Reactions per post
- 2
- Reactions tracked
- 48
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Nov 13, 2026
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 28 posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: You Don't Need 10,000 Steps for Your Brain — 6 reactions on Nov 3, 2026.
Recent posts
- What Thousands of Hits Do to a Brain
- The Blast Is Over. The Risk Isn't.
- The Rare Gene That Shields Alzheimer's Carriers
- Why Alzheimer's Steals Your Deep Sleep
Poor sleep is one of the first things to go in Alzheimer’s. For years, scientists blamed the plaques themselves, or the damaged brain cells around them. A new study from the University of Kentucky points somewhere else... at the brain’s own immune system. Shannon Macauley and Nicholas Constantino studied mice bred to grow amyloid plaques. Plaques are the sticky clumps of protein that build up between brain cells in Alzheimer’s. The team tracked the mice’s brain waves around the clock, at 6 months of age and again at 18 months. The sleep damage showed up early, right when the plaques first…
- You Don't Need 10,000 Steps for Your Brain
You don’t need 10,000 steps. A long study from Mass General Brigham points to a much lower bar. Researchers followed nearly 300 older adults for nine to eleven years. Each person wore a step counter. Many already had early Alzheimer’s changes in the brain. Walking did not clear amyloid plaques, the sticky buildup most Alzheimer’s drugs go after. But in people who already had plaques, more steps meant less tau. Tau is the twisted protein that tangles up inside brain cells. It tracks much more closely with memory loss than plaques do. In the more active walkers, the slide in thinking and daily…
- They Changed the Packet, Not the Portion
# They Changed What Was in the Packet, Not How Much, and Mood Lifted Processing is not the same thing as portion size. That distinction has been argued about for ten years, mostly without anyone testing it properly. Nyasha Chagwedera and Andrew Krystal at the University of California, San Francisco ran the test. Twenty adults spent four weeks eating mostly ultra-processed food, and four weeks eating the same kinds of meals made from whole ingredients. Each person did both arms, so each person was their own comparison — which is the strongest design you can run on a group this small. Fourteen…
- Your Brain Has an Age of Its Own
# They Measured How Old 48,000 Brains Look, and Nine Diseases Answered Differently Your brain has an age of its own. Feed enough healthy brain scans into a model and it learns what 55 looks like, what 70 looks like, what 80 looks like. Then hand it a new scan and it guesses. Subtract the guess from the real birthday and you get a number: how old your brain looks compared with how old you are. Shile Qi and colleagues at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics trained that model on 45,900 healthy scans pulled from imaging databases around the world. Then they ran 2,698 people with…
- The Decaf Did the Memory Part
# The Decaf Did the Memory Part Coffee is not just caffeine. A roasted bean carries something like a thousand compounds, and we have spent fifty years studying one of them. John Cryan’s team at APC Microbiome Ireland in Cork decided to study the rest. They took 62 people — 31 regular coffee drinkers, 31 who never touched it — and ran them through tests of mood, attention and memory, plus a full reading of their gut bacteria. Then they compared caffeinated coffee against decaf. Both lowered felt stress, both lowered low mood, both lowered impulsive choices. So far, no surprise. Then the two…
- Leave the Tangles, Save the Brain
Tau tangles are not the whole story. For thirty years the plan has been simple: find the bad protein, remove the bad protein. David Holtzman’s lab at Washington University in St. Louis has just shown you can leave the bad protein exactly where it is and still save the brain around it. Let me explain what they found. When brain tissue starts to suffer, it releases a chemical beacon. The beacon is called CXCL10, and it works like a flare. Immune cells in your bloodstream — killer T cells, the ones built to destroy infected tissue — carry a receiver tuned to that flare. The receiver is called…
- Lonely and Alone Are Two Different Problems
Being alone is not the same as being lonely. One is a count of people. The other is a feeling, and plenty of men have the feeling in a full house. Lu Qi’s team at Tulane University pulled those two apart in 277,489 adults aged 40 to 69, then followed them for years to see who stayed free of mental illness. The men who carried both - few contacts and the feeling - lost 5.8 years of life free of mental disorders compared with the men who carried neither. Nearly six years. And the two factors stacked rather than overlapping, which tells you they are not measuring the same thing. Let me explain…
- Your Brain Drains Out Through Your Neck
Your Brain Drains Out Through Your Neck Your brain takes out its own trash. The fluid that bathes it picks up waste all day and all night, then leaves the skull and travels down into a cluster of lymph nodes deep in your neck. From there it joins the rest of your lymph system and gets cleared. Think of it as the storm drain under a street. Nobody thinks about it until it blocks. A team at Weill Cornell Medicine, Montefiore Einstein and the Technical University of Munich found out what happens when the drain is removed. Surgeons take those deep neck lymph nodes out during some head and neck…
- The Tipping Point That Decides Dementia
A Tipping Point May Decide Who Gets Dementia Plaque alone does not explain it. Pathologists have known this for decades — brains arrive at autopsy loaded with amyloid from people who stayed sharp until the end. Something else decides who tips over. Let me explain what researchers reported in late July. They describe a hidden tipping point — a threshold where the brain stops absorbing damage and starts failing. Below the line, the damage is real but the brain compensates. Above it, the system gives way and symptoms appear. The plaque is not the switch. The threshold is. Think of a bridge rated…
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Data: Substack public leaderboards and publication archives, refreshed nightly, plus public beehiiv sitemaps and recommendation pages, refreshed weekly. Source for this page: Better Brain. Subscriber counts are Substack’s own rounded public figures, so week-on-week changes move in steps. beehiiv audience sizes are self-reported by the publisher and are not verified. Last snapshot: Nov 13, 2026.