Games Played

When you subscribe to Happy Neuron, you are uniquely identified by your email address. This allows us to track your training progress, to give you advice and to help you improve your performance. It also guarantees the confidentiality of your personal information. Once you have chosen a password and logged in, you are ready to start the training. You have three basic options:

1. You can choose to play any game you like
2. You can play games that stimulate a specific brain function (i.e. memory, language, etc.);
3. You can follow the recommendation of the personal coach.

Standardized Process

For each exercise, the Happy Neuron system measures the accuracy of your answers and your response time. Accuracy is more important than speed, but both are used to compute your scores. Your results are compared with other people who match your gender, age range and level of education. This standardization process assures that the feedback is personalized and particularly relevant to you. At the end of each game, we provide feedback in the form of comments based on comparisons with hundreds of thousands of other players who match your demographic characteristics.

Why should age, gender and educational level be considered?

Certain gender differences may influence players' performances: i.e. women tend to remember language texts better than men (language skills), while men may be better at memorizing the itinerary of a trip (visual spatial skills). Further, a person's educational level may account for better performance on culturally oriented exercises and aging may influence a person's level of concentration and reaction time.

Score calculation

The graph above shows the distribution curve of the results from a normal group of healthy players for a particular exercise. This bell-shaped curve extends over both sides of the average score, showing the mean (average) and the standard deviations. Individuals with a very high level of expertise are beyond two standard deviations to the right of the curve, making up the top 2.5% of the population. Those with scores below two standard deviations may have inadequate effort and concentration or anxiety when facing a novel task. The performance of ninety-five percent (95%) of the population falls between two standard deviations to the left of the mean and two standard deviations to the right.

Happy Neuron has collected almost 8 million exercise results from Internet users. We are thus able to reliably analyze your performance level for each exercise variant and each population category (gender, age and level of education).

Comments and comparisons

The comments at the end of each exercise reflect the position of your scores on the normal curve for your population group (age, gender, education level). If you wish to set target goals for future training, you can look at the "Compare" section where you will see the range of results for the top 25% of persons with a profile similar to yours. Your aim should be to position your scores within these intervals as often as possible.

In order to help you to determine your cognitive profile, you are given several scores ranging from zero to 100 after each exercise. If you achieve the same performance as the average person with a similar profile to yours, your score will be 50. If your performance corresponds to +2 standard deviation, your mark will be 97, and 3 if the standard deviation is -2.

Note: Performances on particular games are not always as symmetric as we have shown in the previous figure. For example, with an easy game variant, half the population can achieve an accuracy score between 90 and 100%, while the other half may have a score between 20 and 90%. Also, remember that both the speed and accuracy of your responses is used to calculate and compare your scores.

Determining the cognitive profile

Our experts in neurology, neuropsychology and cognitive psychology have identified a list of the major cognitive functions used to succeed at each task. The five main cognitive areas are attention, language, memory, executive functions and visual-spatial processing. In addition, there are twenty-five more specific sub-functions including semantic memory, visual working memory, orthographic lexical, hypothetic-deductive reasoning, and mental imaging. For each of these twenty-five brain functions, you are given your average score and together they make up your "Cognitive Profile". You can track the changes in your Cognitive Profile as you exercise your brain over time.

To begin with, of course, your profile is completely unknown and at the outset we set each brain function at the average score of 50. It will be exciting to follow the evolution of your progress.

The more you train, the more your cognitive indicators develop and the more your profile becomes refined. In order to reach a stable and statistically significant profile, you will need to carry out several dozen exercises over a period of weeks and months. You can check your performance process at any time by reviewing your cognitive profile.

Note that, the performance line for certain brain functions may decrease or increase over time even if you don't do any exercises from these specific cognitive areas. Let us explain....

An exercise may mainly focus on training a particular cognitive skill but, at the same time, it also involves other cognitive areas as well. For example, "The Towers of Hanoi" mainly trains executive functions, including strategy and planning. However, the task also trains attention, memory and visual-spatial capabilities, although to a lesser extent. Thus, if you work to achieve a perfect score on "Towers of Hanoi" your performance line for "Executive Functions" will obviously increase, but your performance line for visual-spatial skills will also increase somewhat over time even if you haven't played any specific exercises from this particular cognitive area.

Supervising your training

Now that you know how your profile will be determined over time, we should look at how Happy Neuron can help you improve or maintain a good cognitive performance level. Each time you go to "Coach", your personal coach performs calculations to determine the most relevant exercises that will optimize your training effort, taking into consideration the amount of time you have to spend. These calculations mainly consider the following 3 criteria in order to offer you the appropriate program:

1. Your relative weaknesses
2. Novelty and variety
3. Well-balanced and comprehensiveness

You also have the opportunity to ask the coach for more specific training sessions in order to train particular cognitive skills. As soon as an exercise is over, your advice is updated.

The role of variants and personalized coaching

The personal coach has numerous functions, one of which is to recommend the most appropriate games and particular variants according to your current profile. The variant will be one of several levels of difficulty, easy, moderate or hard. The coach will make a choice based on your level of comfort and how prepared you are for a challenge. When you begin to play a game, a small star icon always indicates your coach's recommendation for this game, based on your profile. The goal is always for you to have an achievable level of success in the process of challenging yourself.

Training frequency

In order to train effectively and to insure gains in your performance over time, we recommend 2 to 3 sessions per week of 30-60 minutes each. If you have time limitations, as everyone does, it may be preferable to do several more short sessions each week rather than one or two long sessions.

We hope this overview has explained the neurologically and statistically grounded foundation of the Happy Neuron program.