Frequently Asked Questions

BrainHQ is a computerized brain training program. You can use BrainHQ online through your web browser, or you can download the app to your phone or tablet.

BrainHQ works by training your brain—doing the exercises regularly, over a period of time, improves how your brain works—just like doing physical exercise regularly, over a period of time, improves how your body works.

BrainHQ adapts to you—as you do a brain exercise, the exercise will get harder or easier depending on your individual performance, so it finds exactly the right level of challenge for you. And BrainHQ has a personal trainer that will take you through the different brain exercises over time, in the order that’s just right for your brain.

On your first day, click the "Start Personal Trainer" button to begin training and learn how to use BrainHQ. It'll look something like this:

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We recommend trying to fit in at least 90 minutes of effective brain training a week. Many people tell us that 3 times a week for 30 minutes at a time works best for them, but others may find 15 minutes a day 6 days a week works better. If you can't commit that much time to BrainHQ because of your busy schedule, it is better to do training when you can than to not train at all.

Recommendation

Try to fit in at least 90 minutes of effective brain training a week. Many people tell us that 3 times a week for 30 minutes at a time works best for them.

Why?

Brain exercise is like physical exercise: making real and lasting changes takes effort.

Recommendation

There are two ways to train in BrainHQ: personalized training and choosing exercises yourself.

• Personalized training (available only to subscribers) customizes a schedule for you based on your unique preferences and performance. It’s a great way to train if you’ve subscribed to BrainHQ and want expert input.
• If you’d like to direct your own training, you can choose a category (Memory, Brain Speed, Attention, People Skills, Intelligence, or Navigation) or an individual exercise. We recommend you start with Attention, and train on those exercise for a week. Move on to the next suite the following week. Cycle through each suite, then repeat! If there’s a specific cognitive area you’d like to improve, such as memory, we recommend you train twice as much in that category as in the others. However, the categories build on one another, so we encourage you to spend some time training outside of the specific area that interests you.

Why?

We’ve found that some people are looking for a general brain workout, while others are seeking to improve their performance for a specific reason.

The Personal Trainer is designed to give you exactly the right BrainHQ exercises for your unique brain each time you train.

Each time you start the Personal Trainer, it looks at your entire brain training history, including your personal performance on every level of every exercise you’ve done. Based on that data, BrainHQ selects a set of exercises that are the optimal ones for you to work on to experience the largest performance improvements.

For most people, we recommend training on the Personal Trainer without making any changes to it. The Personal Trainer is specifically designed to meet the training goals of most adults who want to improve their cognitive abilities.

Recommendation

You must beat your baseline for each level to unlock the next level. That means you have to repeat each level at least once. However, many people ask whether they should repeat levels more than once to increase their performance (shown in their number of stars). That’s a great idea. We recommend you challenge yourself to achieve the highest number of stars you can! That said, there is also a benefit to training in many different levels.

Why?

The benefit to training many times in the same level is that the brain changes best when it is challenged. Getting to a point where a task is hard for you—where your brain is challenged—is an important aspect of positive brain plasticity. The benefit to training in multiple levels is that every exercise level is a little bit different than the other levels. Each one works out a slightly different set of neurons. In order to exercise as many neurons as you possibly can, you must train in many similar (but not the same) ways.

Recommendation

It’s a good idea to complete as many BrainHQ exercises as you can. However, if you really don’t like one, skip it!

Why?

If you continue to use an exercise you dislike, you may want to quit your brain training. Continuing to exercise your brain is far more important than completing an individual exercise!

Why does the speech in BrainHQ sound so weird? Why does it sometimes sound like it’s underwater?

BrainHQ exercises are designed to make information processing in the brain faster and more accurate.

With visual exercises, like Hawk Eye, at first the birds are presented on the screen for a long time, and the contrast between the brightly colored birds and the blue sky is high. This gives the brain a lot of time to see the stimuli, and they “pop out” from the background. This drives a strong response in the brain, helping drive brain plasticity. As Hawk Eye gets more challenging, the time that the birds are shown gets shorter and shorter, meaning that the brain has to get faster and faster to keep up. The birds and the background become more similar, making the exercise more like a real-world visual scene, which is designed to help the improvements from the exercise transfer to real-world performance.

With auditory exercises that use speech, we take a similar approach - but with sound. Human speech is composed of many very fast components. For example, the difference between a “ba” sound and a “pa” sound is just a brief gap of a few tens of milliseconds. So we process the speech sounds in BrainHQ with a digital algorithm that actually stretches the speech sounds out, to make them slower, and emphasizes the loudest parts. This drives a strong response in the brain (like the bright, slow birds on the blue background), helping drive brain plasticity.

As the auditory exercises that use speech get more challenging, we remove that stretching and emphasis, and then actually compress the speech to make it faster than normal - challenging the brain to speed up. This is designed to help the improvements from these exercises transfer to real listening situations - where you might be listening to someone speak quickly, and need to process and remember what they say.

A common misconception is that the processed speech is trying to make speech more intelligible. That’s not what we’re trying to do. You might even find the processed speech more difficult to understand than normal speech. The goal of the speech processing is to drive brain plasticity.

The exercises that use speech processing are:

Syllable Stacks

Memory Grid

To-Do List Training

In The Know

True North

Recommendation

If you find yourself getting bored with an exercise, take a break from that exercise for a while and come back to it at a future date.

Why?

It is important that you are motivated and alert when doing the exercises to maximize the training effect. Being alert and interested causes the brain to release more neuromodulators (brain chemicals important to learning and remembering). Being bored makes this neuromodulatory release more sluggish, so you don’t learn and remember as well.

Recommendation

We realize that there might be times where it will be difficult to maintain your training. For example, you might need to take a break to go on vacation or maybe your life has become extra busy for a while. The good news is that even after taking a break from training the benefits of training remain for a long time. However, we recommend that a break should not last longer than 3 months. One of the great things about BrainHQ is that when you return to training the exercises quickly adapt to your current performance level.

Why?

Although some benefits from brain training exercises can last for a long time (several years according to some studies), there is a decline associated with long periods of non-training. So if you stop training for more than three months, you are likely to move a little backward.

Understanding the Schedule

When you start a personalized training session the Personal Trainer selects six exercise levels and creates what’s called a schedule. By default, the Personal Trainer takes into account all 29 BrainHQ exercises when creating a schedule. The number of exercises the Personal Trainer uses to create a schedule can be altered by setting a custom focus.

The Personal Trainer balances a number of factors to select the specific levels for your session:

• The Personal Trainer prefers to give you levels where you have the most room to improve, compared to your performance goals.
• The Personal Trainer prefers to give you multiple different exercises within a session.
• The Personal Trainer generally tries to put exercises first where you have the greatest opportunity for improvement, and this measure typically changes from session to session depending on your last training session.

The levels the Personal Trainer selects for you are shown on the Personal Trainer screen. Generally you will see six levels, all from different exercises.

Note the repeating pattern in the image below - the first exercise is Eye for Detail, followed by the other five exercises in the schedule, followed by Eye for Detail again signaling the start of a new schedule.

The sequence of exercises shown represents the order in which the Personal Trainer will present exercises to you. In a given session, you may train on a few of them or many of them, depending on your training goal for the week and depending on how many times you repeat each level. The graphic does not mean that you will do every exercise shown.

If there is an exercise that you would like to skip for the time being, it can be skipped by directly clicking on the level you instead want to train on.

Over time, exercises will be removed from the schedule and new exercises introduced to the schedule, so that eventually you train on all of the exercises.

Retiring or Returning to a Level

Whenever you complete an exercise level, the Personal Trainer decides if it should return it to you again in the future. or retire the level.

A level gets returned to your schedule if you did not reach your performance target for that level. If you haven’t scored high enough, that means that the exercise is challenging, which is good! Returning to a previous exercise level for more training is a good sign that you’re training at the right level for your brain.

A level gets retired when you’ve reached your performance target for that level. The Personal Trainer wants you to advance to new or more challenging levels, so if you’ve scored high enough consistently on a level it won’t want you to repeat it.

By default the Personal Trainer wants you to earn at least 3 stars on each level before retiring the level. This can be changed by setting a custom focus.

Retiring an Exercise

Once you have retired a certain number of levels in an exercise, the Personal Trainer will remove that exercise from the active set and add a new exercise. By default, this happens after you retire 10 levels in an exercise. You can also directly set this value in the Custom Focus via the Breadth/Depth setting. Even though this is in the custom focus, this setting applies to any focus you select. If you set this to a lower value, you will move through exercises more quickly and do fewer different levels in an exercise before you are introduced to a new exercise; if you set this higher you will move through exercises more slowly and do more different levels in an exercise before you are introduced to a new exercise.

Setting Goals

In order to best help you visualize your goals, we have a goal tracker on the Training page.

In the example above, the user has completed 21 out of 24 levels that they have set in their weekly goals. This weekly goal tracker will automatically update with how many levels you've completed.

To change the levels in your weekly goal, click your name in the upper right corner of the page, then click "Goals" in the menu that appears. This will bring up the following panel:

Click the or icons to raise or lower the number of levels in your weekly goal.

Setting Reminders

Another tool we have within BrainHQ is a training reminder notification. You can set either request an email or a text message to be sent to you at a certain time on your chosen days of the week.

To set your preferences so that you receive daily reminders, please follow these steps:

1. Log into BrainHQ with your email address and password
2. Click your name in the upper right corner of the page
3. Click "Reminders" in the menu that appears to be taken to the Reminder management section of your profile. It will look like this:
4. Select the time at which you'd like to receive your reminder. The time will be set in your local time zone.
5. Select the days on which you'd like this reminder to be sent. Monday through Friday are set by default, so click those days if you'd like to deselect them. (Selected days will be purple.)
6. You can pick email or text message for the reminder. An email will be sent to the email address you used to register your account. If you choose a text message reminder, you'll need to submit your phone number before you can select the "By text" option.
7. Click "Add a Reminder" to set this reminder.

Reminders that are currently set will appear above these options and will appear in this format:

If you'd like to remove a reminder from your account, click the red circle with the X in it.

BrainHQ provides a comprehensive look at your progress through the Progress page. Here’s how to view your progress:

1. Go to www.BrainHQ.com and logging in (if you aren’t already)
2. Click on the "Progress" tab at the top of the screen.

You should now be on the progress overview page. There are several tabs at the top of this page with different ways to measure your progress:

• Days Trained - What is my BrainAQ?
• Stars Earned - How many stars have I earned?
• Levels Complete - How many levels have I completed?
• Percentile - How can I compare my performance to others?

You can click through the sections above to learn more about the various ways to view your progress.

Please note that this information is only available through BrainHQ on the web - the graphs are not yet available for the BrainHQ app.