Brighten Your Brain

We share our learning and updates about cognition, neuroscience, and the TidePool app here!

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Strengthen Your Brain with a Growth Mindset

Intelligence may have as much to do with how you view yourself as with innate ability. In other words, it’s less the cards you’re dealt and more how you play them.

Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck developed a framework of contrasting mindsets—“fixed” and “growth”—that are shown to influence academic performance, moral character and even the success of long-term relationships1.

Our mindsets guide our interpretation of what happens around us. They’re the stories we adopt that inform our response to events and other people.

A fixed mindset assumes qualities are innate; successes and failures reflect how your ability compares to external standards. With a fixed mindset, you may view each endeavor as a measure of your competence. You’re likely to be discouraged by failure, ignore useful criticism and avoid future challenges.

By contrast, a growth mindset views personal qualities as malleable; you can cultivate your intelligence, character and creativity through effort. Adopting this outlook may help you view setbacks as opportunities, internalize feedback and stretch yourself with new experiences.

Mindset Impacts Achievement

Research suggests adopting a constructive mindset can actually impact how your brain functions. For example, a 2011 study2 shows the ability to recognize and rebound from mistakes is associated with enhanced neural signaling. During acuity tests of 25 undergraduates, scientists observed that growth-minded individuals demonstrated superior accuracy after making mistakes compared with individuals endorsing a more fixed mindset.

Similar achievement benefits have been observed on a wide scale. In a 2015 paper3, researchers presented nearly 1600 students across 13 high schools with growth mindset interventions that encouraged them to persist through academic difficulty.  For example, select students read an article describing the brain’s ability to grow with hard work. Setbacks were explained as learning opportunities instead of as signs of limited potential.

After one semester, the advantage of cultivating growth mindsets was clear: the interventions raised struggling students’ GPAs in core academic courses and increased the rate at which they performed well by 6.4 percent.

This research confirms the findings of previous studies4, 5, 6, that show students perform better by persisting through challenging tasks. When it comes to academic achievement, attitude appears paramount.  

Commit to Growth, Live Better

For those of us who no longer have to worry about exams and GPAs, there are real benefits of maintaining a growth mindset beyond the classroom. In addition to its impact on cognitive performance and achievement, a mindset colors your life experience.

Dweck says the belief that your qualities are set in stone inspires an unhealthy need to prove yourself, and a binary method of self-evaluation: Will I be accepted or rejected? Will I be a winner or a loser?

You can avoid these inflexible labels by investing in a quality that seems key to happiness and to realizing your potential: resilience. Psychology tells us that mindset determines meaning—of your motivations and effort, and of your setbacks and successes. So if you’re not where you want to be, keep going! Each setback is a chance to grow.

References 1 Dweck, Carol. Mindset: the new psychology of success. Ballantine Books: NY (2007) 2 Moser, S et al. Mind your errors: Evidence for a neural mechanism linking growth mind-set to adaptive posterror adjustments. Psych Sci. 22:1484-1489 (2011) 3 Paunesku D, et al. Mind-Set interventions are a scalable treatment for academic underachievement. Psychol. Science. 1-10 (2015) 4 Aronson J, Fried, CB, and Good C. Reducing the effects of stereotype threat on African American college students by shaping theories of intelligence. J. Exper. Soc Psyc. 38: 113-125 (2002) 5 Blackwell LS, Trzesniewski, KH, and Dweck, CS. Implicit theories of intelligence predict achievement across an adolescent transition: A longitudinal study and an intervention. Child Dev. 78: 246–263 (2007) 6 Good C, Aronson, and Inzlicht, M. Improving adolescents’ standardized test performance: an intervention to reduce the effects of stereotype threat. J Appl. Dev. Psych. 24: 645–662 (2003)

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Win a Pro membership with tales of #mommybrain

When we talk to women about brain training, we hear a lot of worries about “mommy brain” (a.ka. “momnesia”). New moms find themselves putting milk away under the sink, pouring OJ into their coffee, or wearing mis-matched shoes all day more often than they did before.

Pregnancy and early parenthood are tumultuous times emotionally, physiologically and cognitively. Most evidence suggests that new stress and lack of sleep add up to distraction and discombobulation. While the causes of mommy brain are up for debate, it’s a fact that lots of new moms report these same symptoms.

TidePool wants to help! Tell us your #mommybrain story on Twitter @tidepool_co or Facebook/TidePoolInc, and we’ll give you three free months of Pro membership to the TidePool app. TidePool is filled with fun games that train your memory, focus, reasoning, and more.

Tweet Your Story

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Improve Your Memory While You Sleep!

Actually, you can't help but work on your memory during sleep. Sleep interacts with memory in at least three important ways:

Making Memories Ever notice you have a hard time keeping track of things after a sleepless night? That’s because nightly sleep helps to prepare your brain for making new memories.

In one study, participants were kept awake throughout the night and asked to look through a series of pictures while their brain activity was measured using fMRI. Two days later, participants were quizzed on the pictures they had seen. Sleep deprived participants showed a 17% decrease in memory scores relative to those who slept comfortably at home.1

The researchers found that this drop in memory was linked to reduced brain activation in an important memory center called the hippocampus. Not only was the hippocampus less active after sleep deprivation, but communication between the hippocampus and other frontal brain areas were also altered.

Keeping Memories If you're studying new information, learning a language, or a new musical piece, you may find that sleep is the best way to lock in your learning and make it last.

In a 2012 report, researchers showed that people who had learned a new musical tune could play it back more accurately if they took a nap.2 This alone was nothing new, as there have been multiple reports of better memory after sleep. But the researchers added a clever trick to the study by secretly playing one melody during deep sleep. Even though the participants were not aware of which tune was played, they were more accurate at playing the tune played during sleep when they awoke. This suggests that sleep might enhance memories by naturally replaying them while you’re unconscious.

Forgetting the right stuff Sometimes it’s just as important to forget the unimportant stuff as it is to remember the right stuff. Appropriate forgetting — like forgetting where you parked on last week's grocery trip — may help the brain prepare for newer, more important memories — like remembering where you parked today.

In a recent study participants were shown a list of words and, instead of being asked to remember all of the words, they were given instructions about which words were supposed to be forgotten. After a 100-minute nap, participants remembered only the words they were supposed to at nearly twice the rate of their non-napping counterparts.3

This study shows that the effect of sleep on memory is more sophisticated than previously thought. Instead of generally boosting every little memory you collect, it appears that sleep selectively bolsters the most important stuff leaving room for new memories the next day.

Share with Sleepy Friends:     Twitter     Facebook     Email

References: 1. http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v10/n3/abs/nn1851.html 2. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3498459/ 3. http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/09/07/cercor.bhr034.full

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The New Face of Brain Training

Today's TidePool app update is truly a labor of brain power! It includes all new navigation and a return to our secret agent story. Let us know what you think at [email protected].

New map shows progress

Today's update includes a completely redesigned headquarters: the story and map take you through a secret agent adventure all over the world.

New secret agent story

The mysterious adventure unfolds as you advance.

Improved performance tracking

Compare your scores each day and over time to get a clearer picture of your progress. And, once you challenge a friend, you'll now be able to unlock a Pro subscription by inviting friends to the app.

Get the New App

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Memory Peaks and Valleys

Codebreaker is a simple game that gets harder fast. A classic memory task (remember a pattern of colored dots, then recreate the pattern after it is hidden), Codebreaker stumps most of us by level 9.

Codebreaker builds your short-term memory for locations by asking you to remember increasingly complex patterns in shorter amounts of time. Over 25% of players get stumped on level 6, when the number of dots to search through jumps from 12 to 16, and the amount of time to remember the pattern goes down from .45 seconds to .4. Researchers studying memory have consistenty found that most people can remember about 7 items (plus or minus 2), in working memory, which is the number players must remember to pass level 6 in Codebreaker. However, you'll find that more than just the number of dots changes the difficulty of the game. Some patterns are easier to remember because they lend themselves well to 'chunking', being broken up into sub-patterns, which the brain can then treat as a single item. Just .1% of players — one out of a thousand — have ever made it to level 14, which requires players to recreate a pattern of 15 yellow dots spread over 35 spaces, with only .2 seconds to memorize them. And less than half that number of people have beaten that challenge and made it to level 15, the highest level. If you're one of them, let us know! Try the App Now

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Agency Report: Self Improvement Goals

When you first start playing TidePool as a new user, you'll kick off with a questionnaire asking you to rate your ability in several everyday cognitive tasks (like planning the best route to a new location), along with questions about whether you get enough exercise and sleep.

Peoples' ratings of their cognitive abilities, averaged across all factors (Speed, Adaptability, Reasoning, Memory, and Focus), are shown in the blue bars below. They follow a roughly normal distribution, with most people rating themselves three stars out of five. But the pattern for sleep and physical activity looks very different. A majority of people rate themselves with only one star in these areas, meaning they think they don't go to sleep at a consistent time, stay asleep throughout the night, or get enough exercise as part of their daily lives. The people who say they don't get enough sleep are not necessarily the same people who think that they didn't get enough exercise. These two areas are not very strongly correlated. TidePool will be using this data and more from the new questionnaire to customize the app and focus on users' self-improvement goals. We're excited to integrate more sleep and fitness features into the app soon to help TidePool agents improve in these areas. Email or tweet us and let us know what personal goals you'd like to work on through fun TidePool games.

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Why TidePool Wants to Make You Smile

In our high-pressured society, we spend a lot of time scowling at our computers, narrowly focusing on our to-do lists. But scientists are beginning to understand the link between positive emotions (especially smiling) and the ability to “think outside the box” and make creative connections we otherwise couldn’t make.

Dr. Barbara Fredrickson has been at the forefront of this research, showing that when people genuinely smile — fake smiles don’t count — they increase their ability to shift their attention and reduce tunnel vision. In a 2010 study, Fredrickson found that people who had just seen a video of penguins, and smiled a lot as a result, were better able to change focus quickly, moving betwee, contexts more easily, and actually broadening the scope of their vision.

"Humor is an essential part of spontaneity, an essential part of the creativity that we need to solve problems."

This idea that creativity is fueled by positivity is aptly (and hilariously) described by Monty Python Icon John Cleese. Cleese describes this mindset as being in the “open mode,” a state where you can build new connections and literally play with ideas. His talk is not only inspiring to creative professionals, but also well grounded in the new science of positive psychology.

TidePool’s Adaptability games are designed to train and test the kind of cognitive flexibility that is important for creative thinking. Try smiling the next time you play Booby Trap, Evidence or Time Machine and you may find that your scores improve with your mood!

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Agency Report: Monday, Monday

What days of the week are you most likely to train your brain? TidePool players tend to start the week of right, with over 18% of game plays taking place on Monday.

As with a lot of good habits, plays drop off over the course of the week, until Friday sees only 14.5% of games. Then TidePool Agents recharge over the weekend and start all over on Monday! What motivates you to train your brain? Tweet us @tidepool_co or email [email protected] and tell us what reminds you to train.

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Agency Report: Reasoning Doesn't Decline with Age

Anyone who's ever had a 'senior moment' shares the common knowledge that memory declines as we age. Many studies have confirmed this belief, and so far, TidePool users have seen the same result. The graph below shows the average scores for different age groups using the TidePool app.

It might be tempting to assume that all cognitive functions get worse with age, but that isn't the case. As shown here, reasoning (thinking logically and solving problems), which involves using memory, doesn't decline significantly.

Studies have also shown that consistent brain training can improve cognitive functions for older adults, including memory in daily activities, though results for reasoning are even stronger.

Of course, data like these aren't a prediction of the future. Any one person can be better or worse at memory or reasoning tasks, regardless of age. The graph above shows a cross-section of the TidePool population at one moment in time, and the app hasn't been around long enough to show results for individuals over time. The world is just learning what brain training can do!

Tweet us @TidePool_co to let us know if these results ring true for you.

Data was analyzed from TidePool games played between 8/10/14 and 1/21/15. Players were included in the analysis if they had 1) reported their age and 2) played at least 3 games in both the memory and reasoning categories. Memory games included Codebreaker, Lockpicker and Defuse while reasoning games included Getaway, DeadDrop, Escape and Snooper. Raw scores on these games were converted to scaled scores by subtracting the population mean and dividing by the population standard deviation. The lines plotted here represent linear trends (least squares) for age by median scaled score per player.

We verified that memory scores were indeed more affected by age than reasoning scores using a general linear model. The model included age, scaled median memory scores, scaled median reasoning scores and an interaction term of age by cognitive factor. Residuals from a Weighted Least Squares regression, weighting points by the inverse of the square of player age, were indistinguishable from Gaussian white noise. We found a significant effect (coefficient estimate= -0.014, log(p) < -10) of the interaction term (age by cognitive factor) indicating that memory scores decline more steeply than reasoning scores with increasing age.

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How to Make Health a Habit

This week, Team TidePool sat down with Megan Durst, a corporate wellness coach who has worked for the past six years with several large Silicon Valley companies. Since brain training is still a relatively new field, we’re learning all we can from people like Megan who have experience helping people to build healthy fitness and lifestyle habits.

Megan visiting the TidePool office. The Big Picture Megan has seen first-hand that one-size-fits-all training doesn’t actually work for everyone, and advocates for a more holistic view of self-improvement. “A lot of programs would just tell everyone, ‘Run more!,’ but when people have stress, anxiety, depression, they can’t even think about eating right or exercise. Just telling them to go for a run can turn them off to the whole thing.” Mental health underlies all our good and bad habits, and is essential to how we think about taking care of ourselves. “No one’s goal is to sit on the couch eating cookies all day.” Addressing underlying mental blocks is integral to starting a new fitness program - physical or cognitive. Most of the population doesn’t have mental health issues that rise to the level of a clinical diagnosis, so issues like low-level stress or anxiety often fall through the cracks and are never addressed by individuals or health-care providers. When meeting with a client who shares that they are dealing with emotional stress, Megan recommends that they seek professional support, but also discusses techniques such as mindfulness meditation and breathing exercises that they can employ when stress arises in their day-to-day life. Measure Twice Most of the programs Megan has worked on kick off with a physical health evaluation, involving tests of cholesterol, blood pressure, and other key indicators. Seeing these numbers in black and white can be a powerful motivator for participants, but can also be overwhelming. “I ask people to focus on one or two of the results that they would like to improve,” Megan says, a technique to increase motivation. “I like to suggest a couple of manageable options, not a complete lifestyle overhaul.”

“Seeing the numbers change is hugely motivational for people.” Keeping track of your progress can provide focus and motivation in addition to hard data about the efficacy of programs. Megan’s wellness colleagues often share the axiom: “What gets measured gets managed.” Getting Help We all need personal support when it comes to making time for healthy habits, too. In workplace programs, Megan points out, “It’s key for managers to be on board so that they can support their employees’ wellness goals. Allowing employees to go to a health class over lunch, is a good example”. Family support at home is also critical. “Asking for help is not a weakness. It’s something that we all should do.” It may not always feel natural to ask for help to make time for healthy habits, especially if they're not the prototypical activities people equate with health: "I like to relax by walking my dog and listening to a podcast, and may need to ask for help around the house to find time to do that." An App for That We believe that, even for people who are motivated, an app, class, or training program can make it easier to stick to healthy habits by providing measurement, education, manageable daily goals, and positive reinforcement. For Megan, the key to forming any new habit and making it stick is that positive feedback and information. “Some people thrive in that drill sergeant, boot camp mentality of ‘tough love’, but it’s definitely not for everyone!” Starting slow can allow positive reinforcement early — for example, RunKeeper starts new runners out with short intervals of running and walking — making a larger goal, like running a 5k, feel achievable. Apps like Headspace and Calm provide game-like rewards and progress tracking for meditation, adding positive external reinforcement to a behavior that’s already good for you. We’ll keep building findings from lots of experts into future versions of the TidePool brain training app. Stay tuned! Get the App

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Does Your Subconscious Feel Lucky?

TidePool’s training games are great for improving cognitive functions like memory, adaptability, and focus. But games can also help you understand your psychological characteristics. Three new self-assessment games in the latest TidePool update are designed to give you a window into parts of your mind you might not normally think about. (Like Train Station, which you can read about in a previous post.)

Big bets can help you find out if you’re more prone to take risks than the average person. In Big Bets, you’re asked to make a gamble, betting on a roulette wheel which gives you different odds of earning changing amounts of money with each spin.

On each turn, you can hold and keep $100, or spin and potentially win more. Some people opt to spin even when the odds are against them. Others are more risk-averse, preferring to take only safe bets, even when there is a lot of money on the table. Big Bets adjusts to your style, and determines your risk-taking type based on your decisions across 25 spins.

Big Bets is designed to dial in on two key metrics: 1) how much money needs to be on the table before you bet and 2) what your probability of winning needs to be in order to bet. The interaction of these metrics tells us how much you like to take risks and also whether you tend to rely on your gut or rely on the math when taking risks.

Big Bets is based on the science of risk-taking and impulsivity. A similar test is used in psychology to measure personal impulsivity amongst gamblers, alcoholics and other at-risk populations.

Even if you’re not a gambler, you make decisions every day about money, risk, and reward. Try playing Big Bets and compare your results with your friends. You might be surprised at how differently some people feel about taking risks.

Unfortunately, Big Bets doesn’t pay you real money, but we hope these new self-assessments games deliver personal insights that pay off big!

Play Now In the App

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Holiday Mystery Party Answers Revealed

Thanks to everyone who played TidePool's Holiday Mystery Party Game over the break. We hope you enjoyed it!

In case you were stumped, answers are below. If you haven't played yet, stop scrolling and play now!

Question 1 (hidden behind the picture frame!) Create four four-letter words from the letters E I L V: EVIL LIVE VEIL VILE

Question 2 (hidden under the rug on the left) Each of these descriptions can be answered with a single letter. Can you solve them all? You see with it: I You wait in it: Q You ask it: Y You drink it: T

Question 3 (hidden in the gift on the table) Your gift weighs 10 pounds more than half its weight. How much does it weigh?: 20 pounds

Question 4 (hidden under the sofa) The clock just struck 12:30 AM. how many times will the hands cross each other before 12:30 PM? 11 times

Question 5 (hidden behind the window curtain) Four agents from the Austin agency (A1,A2,A3 & A4) and four agents from the Bond agency (B1,B2,B3 & B4) flee the scene in two getaway cars. - No two agents with the same number are in the same car. - Agent B1 is in the red car and agent B2 is in the green car. - Agent A3 is driving the red car. - There are equal numbers of Agents from the Austin and Bond agencies in each car. Who are the four agents in the green car?: A1, B2, B3, A4

For more brain challenges, download the TidePool app, or find us on Facebook.

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Does Your Subconscious Look on the Bright Side?

Everyone knows the old test for optimism or pessimism: is the glass half full, or half empty? TidePool’s new game, Train Station, is scientists’ version, designed to give a much deeper understanding of your subconscious outlook, and to answer the question: do you look on the bright side, or focus on the negative?

Play Now In the App

    On each turn, you’ll see pictures of two people you might encounter in a train station. When the pictures disappear, tickets are revealed behind one of the faces, and your task is to click the tickets as quickly as possible. Over one minute of continuous trials, slight differences in your reaction time reveal your attraction to different types of emotional faces.

If you tend to focus more on positive emotions, you’ll be quicker to pick up the tickets when they appear behind happy images. On the flip side, if you click the tickets more quickly behind negative faces, you may tend to be more pessimistic.

Some of the faces are neutral, and an unconscious preference for those faces can mean that you control your emotions closely, because you are not being swayed by the allure of the emotional expressions.

    The basis of Train Station is a scientific protocol used to test attentional bias. In the scientific literature this type of test is called the “Posner test” because it was first developed by Dr. Posner and colleagues in 1980. They discovered that a person reacts more quickly to a cue that appears in a part of the screen that (s)he is paying attention to, as opposed to a part (s)he is not paying attention to.

Maybe you’re thinking, “I could have told you that!” But the magic in Posner’s discovery is that you can use this protocol to scientifically measure what people are paying attention to without asking them. Subconscious biases can be revealed that could never be measured before. The ability to scientifically quantify subconscious attention has paved the way to study all kinds of psychological influences and automatic biases.

Find Train Station in the TidePool app menu under ‘self assessments’, and tell us what you think!

Play Now In the App

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Get Smarter Together with Challenge Mode

Good news, brain training agents! Now you can challenge your friends to play any game in the TidePool app, any time.

    Challenge Mode is designed to help you and your friends get smarter together -- see who can get the highest score in 60 seconds, and start a brain training resolution.

  Just get the latest TidePool app update. Then visit headquarters or use the main menu to access Challenge Mode. You can send invitations to your friends via text or email.

  If you have questions or comments about Challenge Mode, please let us know!

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Agency Report: Max Level in Getaway

TidePool agents love a challenge. Getaway, one of users' favorite games, is also one of the toughest.

  The chart below shows users' best-ever level in Getaway:

    The game gets tougher quickly: Most players, over 83%, have not passed level 8.

  Only 24 intrepid players have ever made it to level 12 or higher!

  Have questions about this data? Is there something else you'd like to know? Tweet us @tidepoo_co, or message us on facebook.

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Agency Report: Training at All Hours of the Day

When do you like to get your brain workout? If you're like most TidePool agents, you're training between 7 and 10pm, when over 27 percent of all games are played.

Very few users are training in the wee hours of the morning: Only 3.4% of games were played between 2 and 5am. This is a good sign, as getting enough sleep is an important factor in cognitive function and overall health.

Another interesting fact: Almost the same number of games are played at midnight as at noon: 4.1 versus 4.7 percent.

  What information would you like to see each week in the Agency Report? Email us and let us know.

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Step Up Your Training: Go Pro!

To get the most fun and insights from your daily brain training, go Pro! A Pro account with TidePool lets you access new data-driven features and all your favorite games.

  Open the App to Go Pro

  Your Brain's Personal Dashboard

See your progress in each key cognitive area, visualized on your personal dashboard. Compare to your previous performance, or see where you rank among all users.

  Play All the Games!

A Pro membership lets you play your all favorite games any time. Play Snooper on the train, or Dead Drop in line for more fun and more training.

  Go Pro Today

During our Early Bird promotion, you can get a Pro account at a discounted price. Subscribe for a year to get the best Pro price: it's less than $6 per month. Or try a one-month membership for just $7.99. These special rates won't last long — lock them in today.

  Open the App to Go Pro