I’d like to introduce you to The Great Brain Experiment. My husband sent me a link to this iPhone app this morning. This app is a series of mind exercises that measure:
- Your memory
- How fast you are at stopping an urge to perform an action (think Fruit Ninja with a twist)
- How quickly your brain can make sense of what it sees
- How willing you are to take risks and how you review rewards earned
What makes this extra special is that is demonstrates the dawn of a new era in neuroscience research. Once upon a time a handful of people had to go to a lab. These people were usually college students since those were the subjects close at hand. Mobile health is changing this dynamic.
“This is the way neuroscience is going at the moment,” says Harriet Brown, a PhD student at University College London’s Centre for Neuroimaging. “We’re not happy looking at just 20 people in a lab. We want to look at 30,000 people and see how they vary. This is a way of reaching a lot of people easily.”
According to Fast Company, more than 20,000 have already played at least one of the games, which has already provided insights.
I’d be fascinated to know how our readers fair as a subset to the experiment. Go ahead and download the app. If you are willing, post your results below. Here are mine:
- The Memory Game: I scored a 633. My score got better over time. I had a much easier time recalling the stagnant shapes than I did the patterns.
- The Impulsivity Game: 309. Yes, I’m impulsive. No shock there.
- Brain Sees Game: I got a 78 here. I thought I was doing pretty good, but second llama? Really? I’m interested to see what others score here because both myself and the author in the Fast Company article had scores out of sorts with the other scores listed. Not sure if that’s just because we are both crazy bad or if the scoring is different for this game.
- The Risk Game: 389. I’m a risk taker, but it paid off in this particular case.
