BrainHQ FAQ

BrainHQ, the interactive brain training program built by Posit Science, is your online headquarters for working out your brain. Think of it as a personal gym, where you exercise your memory, attention, brain speed, people skills, intelligence and navigation instead of your abs, delts, and quads. Just as our bodies require care and exercise over the course of life, so do our brains—especially as we age. BrainHQ provides the exercise your brain needs to be at its sharpest.

Posit Science is the company that built and runs BrainHQ. The company was founded by Dr. Michael Merzenich, a professor emeritus in neuroscience at the University of California at San Francisco, and its staff includes multiple experts on the brain. Learn more about the science behind BrainHQ.

Improving your brain’s performance has the potential to bring countless benefits to your everyday life. Both science studies and customer stories show BrainHQ speeds up thinking, sharpens attention, and enhances memory—and these benefits lead to myriad others, from safer driving to feeling more confident. If you’d like to read about the experiences of our customers, visit our proven in lives section of the website. For a description of science studies and their results, visit our published research section of the website.

Cognitive scientists from around the world have brought their best ideas to BrainHQ and look to make each part of every exercise as powerful as possible. More than 100 patents cover the technologies in the BrainHQ exercises, so explaining how they work in a comprehensive manner is daunting.

Simply put, however, the exercises are based on a handful of powerful ideas. Unlike previous cognitive training, they do not try to fix a problem by practicing it—they don’t improve memory by practicing memory. Instead, the exercises start with elemental cognitive function by first improving the speed and accuracy of your sensory perceptions. This becomes the foundation for improved attention. Improved attention is the building block of working memory, and working memory is the building block of much else—immediate memory, delayed memory, episodic memory, executive function, reasoning, speech and language, visual-spatial skills, and so on. No one has taken this complete bottom-up approach to cognitive training before.

In addition, our scientists are experts in brain plasticity, the ability of the brain to re-wire and change. Each exercise draws on what experts have learned in recent years about driving change in the brain. Training must be focused on improving speed to meet real-world conditions; it must intensively and progressively improve accuracy; it must adapt continuously and minutely (by thousandths of a second) to each person’s performance; it must be designed so the task gradually generalizes to real-world experience; it must be engaging in a way that stimulates neurotransmitters (chemicals in the brain that enhance attention, learning and mood) and that brings you back to do the exercises again and again.

Yes. More than a hundred journal articles report the impact of Posit Science brain training exercises on normal aging adults. These indicate that the Posit Science technology in BrainHQ not only improves key standard measures of cognitive function (including speed and accuracy of processing, attention, and memory), they also improve key standard measures of quality of life (including health-related quality of life, feelings of control, and functional independence). The studies meet the gold standard for study design: they were blinded, randomized controlled trials (the same study design used in drug trials), had statistically significant results, and have been published in peer-reviewed journals. The vast majority were conducted by independent researchers with no financial support from Posit Science. View these studies in our published research section of the website.

This level of proof is unique about brain fitness companies. While other companies sell brain training products, few have undergone any clinical testing, and, to date, no others have been subjected to these multiple independent, peer-reviewed studies. Additional studies are currently underway.

If you are interested in learning more about our studies, visit our published research section of our website. If you are a researcher who would like to conduct a study, click here.

You can use the first levels of select exercises in BrainHQ absolutely free of charge. You can use them as often as you like, for as long as you like. However, if you’d prefer to access the full range of BrainHQ’s exercises and benefits, you may pay a monthly charge of $14 or an annual charge of $96. To purchase a subscription, click here.

BrainHQ is designed so that you can spend as little as two minutes to as much time as you like in it at any given time. Any training is better than none! A good rule of thumb is to follow the basic guidelines for physical exercise: use it at least three times a week for 30 minutes each time.

There are a couple of options. If you’d like BrainHQ to choose exercises for you, it comes with a Personalized Training feature that continually assesses your progress and serves up the exercises where you can improve your performance the most. As an alternative, you can chart your own course through the exercises based on your interests.

There are many BrainHQ exercises, separated into six categories: Memory, Attention, Brain Speed, People Skills, Intelligence, and Navigation. To learn more about these categories and the individual exercises in them, click here.

Almost all adults can improve in the brain functions that BrainHQ trains. The program’s exercises adapt dynamically to skill level, so your brain is always challenged to improve.

Click here to get started on BrainHQ, or here to log in again if you have already registered.

Absolutely! Of course, if you are having any issues feel free to contact our support team.

Yes! For a complete list of languages and links to access other versions, click here.

To get help, please visit our contact page.