unexpected result from BrainHQ testing

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PSu82537%a6r_dnz
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unexpected result from BrainHQ testing

Post by PSu82537%a6r_dnz »

I am wondering how to interpret my experience with BrainHQ, which I subscribed to because it is one of the recommendations in the Bredesen book. I started using it more than a year ago, and in January of this year I got pretty serious with it, and kept an excel spreadsheet of my individual percentile scores in each of the six categories they measure. For awhile I saw a slow but reasonably steady increase in those scores. The scores seemed subjectively reasonable to me, in the sense that my lowest scores were in "people skills," and I had been independently conscious of a weakness in that area. For several months I took the BrainHQ training very frequently, at least several times per week, and many extended periods of daily use. I used the "personal trainer" feature mostly, which selects a set of exercises for you and trains for about an hour. I did occasionally select specific exercises on my own, either to just because I found those exercises fun, or to give myself extra work in selected areas. My percentile scores went up gradually, and my scores in the People Skills area went up more than others, though they are still the lowest when compared to the other five. I got to a point where the scores sort of stagnated at a particular level, and I got distracted into other activities, and quit using that app for two months. Today I went back to it, almost exactly two months since the last time I used it. I was fully expecting to see significant drops in all of my percentile scores. I was surprised to see that my overall score had remained the same, and only two or three of the individual scores had dropped. As I was doing the exercises I had a subjective feeling that I was doing much worse than I had done previously. Especially in the exercises focused on people skills I thought I had really performed poorly, and expected a much bigger drop than the one percentile point shown in my results. So now I am trying to figure out what that means. Thinking about it one way causes me to have less belief in this tool, because it did not do what I expected. When I was using it near daily, and seeing what I considered to be appropriate gains, I wondered how accurate it is. Was it really measuring my cognitive abilities in some "real" way, or was it just measuring improved skill at playing these video games? It puzzles me that my performance in the individual exercises was much worse, but the percentile scores dropped very little.
Anybody have any similar or different experiences with BrainHQ? Anybody have an opinion on how to interpret these results?
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floramaria
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Re: unexpected result from BrainHQ testing

Post by floramaria »

PSu82537%a6r_dnz wrote: Anybody have any similar or different experiences with BrainHQ? Anybody have an opinion on how to interpret these results?
Hello. I know exactly what you are talking about. Unlike you, I had not taken a long break, but my percentile jumped in a way that made no sense to me since I had not improved much if at all. When I clicked my improved percentile, in the new system, I could see what had happened. Brain HQ had changed how they present the percentile. Before the percentile that you would see displayed was your percentile in relation to ALL people training on Brain HQ. (In that old system when you clicked into the "percentile zone", you could also see your percentile based on age.)
I am fairly certain that the change you saw is because that they no longer display the "compared to everyone" figure. The percentile that is displayed is compared to everyone else your age.
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IFM/ Bredesen Training in Reversing Cognitive Decline (March 2017)
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