Mother’s Day Is Sunday May 8, 2017May 5, 2017 So how about giving her the gift of mental acuity? Help take 10 years off her mental age and avoid dementia? If you give your mom a year of BrainHQ you’ll get — as a bonus — a free year yourself! (Sure, you’re just 39 — but so is Tom Brady, and he swears by it.) “And wait — there’s more!” Take advantage of this special Mother’s Day offer and get, also, a free download of Soft-Wired: How the New Science of Brain Plasticity Can Change Your Life by much-awarded BrainHQ inventor Michael Merzenich. (“What if you had the power to change your brain for the better? In Soft-Wired, Dr. Michael Merzenich–a world authority on brain plasticity–explains how the brain rewires itself across the lifespan, and how you can take control of that process to improve your life. In addition to fascinating descriptions of how your brain has produced your unique memories, skills, quirks, and emotions, Soft-Wired offers sound advice for evaluating your brain and gives clear, specific, scientifically proven guidance for how to rejuvenate, remodel, and reshape your brain to improve it at any age.”) You can send Mom the gift electronically or print out a certificate to deliver in person. If she does the BrainHQ exercises an hour a week for ten weeks this year — and four more hours four years from now — a 10-year study of 2,800 subjects suggests she’ll have a 48% lower likelihood of developing dementia than if she just did crossword puzzles. And (as I’ve written before, being an enthusiastic shareholder in this enterprise): imagine how low that risk would fall if she did, say, 10 hours a year of these exercises every year. By 90%? Not a bad gift for a holiday whose commercialization its founder found appalling. Or you could just give her chocolates.