Better Brain
A different game every day. Memory, speed, logic, language. The content changes daily so it never gets stale.
- Top in Finance
- #29
- Followers
- 43K
- 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: #29 today · #76 a week ago
Stats worth sharing
Tracked since Oct 4, 2026 — 21 daily snapshots so far. The card below is built from what we track and refreshes nightly.
- Percentile
- Top 6%
- Best rank seen
- #29
- Rank, 7 days
- +47 places
- Followers added
- +28K
- Posts
- 13
- Reactions per post
- 1
- Reactions tracked
- 19
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Oct 24, 2026
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 20 posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: The Tipping Point That Decides Dementia — 6 reactions on Oct 16, 2026.
Recent posts
- 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…
- Your Belly and Your Memory Center
Obesity May Fuel Alzheimer’s Through the Brain’s Fat Cells Belly fat and memory keep turning up together. The link is old news. What has been missing is the wiring diagram — how extra weight in the middle reaches cells inside the skull. Let me explain what researchers reported at the end of July. They traced a route from obesity to Alzheimer’s disease running through how brain cells handle fat. Excess body fat shifts the way fats are stored and burned inside brain tissue itself, and that shift feeds the inflammation and protein buildup that define the disease. It fits a wider pattern from…
- Why Poor Sleep Wrecks Some Brains More
Poor Sleep Wrecks Some Brains More Than Others You know men who thrive on six hours. You also know men who fall apart on seven. Sleep research has spent years treating that gap as noise. A report at the end of July went looking for the reason instead. Let me explain what they found. The same poor sleep hit different brains differently — and the difference tracked with biology, not willpower. Some brains cleared the damage from a bad night. Others carried it forward. That points to a vulnerability that varies from man to man, and it means “how much sleep do I need” may be the wrong question…
- A Weight-Loss Drug, 21% Fewer Episodes
A Weight-Loss Drug Cut Psychiatric Trouble by 21% Bipolar disorder is hard on the body. The mood swings get the attention, but the metabolic damage runs underneath — weight gain, diabetes, heart disease, often made worse by the medications that stabilize the mood. So researchers in Sweden asked a practical question. They looked at nearly 15,000 people with bipolar disorder and compared those who used semaglutide — the drug sold as Ozempic and Wegovy — against those who did not. Users had a 21% lower risk of psychiatric episodes serious enough to land them in care. Nobody knows the mechanism…
- Transplanted Cells Rebuilt a Stroke Brain
Transplanted Cells Rebuilt a Stroke-Damaged Brain A stroke kills tissue for good. That is the part rehab cannot undo — it trains what survived. A team at the University of Zurich, led by Christian Tackenberg with Ruslan Rust at the University of Southern California, went after the dead zone itself. Here is what they transplanted. They started with human skin-type cells, reprogrammed back into a stem-cell state, then pushed forward into neural progenitors — young cells still deciding what kind of brain cell to become. One week after inducing a stroke in mice, they injected those progenitors…
- One Sleep Stage Tracked With 83 Fewer Diseases
One Sleep Stage Tracked With 83 Fewer Diseases Hours are not the whole story. Most sleep advice stops at duration. A team including researchers at Capital Medical University in Beijing went after the shape of the night instead. Let me explain how they measured it. They took 95,559 adults from the UK Biobank, average age 56, and had each wear a wrist monitor for seven days and nights. That device separated REM sleep, deep sleep and light sleep. Then the team followed their health records for a median of nearly nine years, across more than 1,000 different diagnoses. More REM sleep tracked with…
- A Shingles Shot Tracked With 24% Less Dementia
The virus never leaves you. If you had chickenpox as a kid, it is still sleeping in your nerves, and shingles is that virus waking back up. About one in three adults gets shingles at some point, and the risk climbs with age. Let me explain the new numbers. Researchers at Brown University, led by Kaleen Hayes, studied more than 500,000 Medicare patients aged 66 and older who entered skilled nursing facilities. Some got at least one dose of Shingrix, the current shingles vaccine, within a year of admission. Four years later, 18.8% of the vaccinated group had a dementia diagnosis, against 24.6%…
- A Sleep Patch That Reaches Deep Into the Brain
REM sleep is hard to fix. It is the dreaming stage, when the brain sorts emotion and files certain memories, and it tends to shrink and fragment with age, stress and alcohol. Many sleeping pills make it worse. Let me explain what the University of Texas at Austin built. It is a soft patch that sticks to the head and does two jobs at once. Gentle focused ultrasound reaches a deep structure called the subthalamic nucleus, which the team thinks feeds into the circuits that switch REM on. Built-in electrodes record brain waves at the same time, so the device can see what it is doing. In 28…
- Your Brain’s Night Shift Runs at Two Speeds
Your brain has no ordinary drains. Every other organ uses the lymphatic system to haul away waste. In 2012, Maiken Nedergaard’s lab at the University of Rochester described a workaround she named the glymphatic system — a fluid flush that washes through brain tissue, mostly during deep sleep. Let me explain the new piece. Measuring that flow has been close to impossible, because a standard MRI cannot see fluid speed directly. Douglas Kelley and colleagues at Rochester, Brown and the University of Copenhagen trained an artificial intelligence model on MRI videos of dye moving through mouse…
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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: Oct 24, 2026.