I like to play games. The Words With Friends app and online puzzles, like Connections on the New York Times app, keep me thinking. Online games can be important to someone with multiple sclerosis (MS), where cognitive fog and fatigue are both common symptoms.
So I was very interested when I was offered the chance to try a website and app called BrainHQ. It’s designed to help improve the brain’s processing speed and, by doing that, help improve things like cognition and fatigue. I’ve been sitting down with it 2 or 3 times a week for the past 6 weeks or so, and have found that it’s fun and challenging. It can also be frustrating, in a good way.
The training covers 6 categories: brain speed, attention, memory, people skills, intelligence, and navigation. Each involves using a different brain “skill.” For example, in “Attention,” you’re challenged by having to track some moving objects while ignoring others. In “People Skills,” the object may be to remember information about people in a group, like you might encounter at a party—associating faces with personal information, as the group grows larger and the information changes. “Brain Speed” requires you to identify sound and visual sweeps (up and down/in and out) as they come at you at increasing speeds.
Each category contains 4 to 7 exercise types, and each exercise has anywhere from a dozen to as many as 60 levels of difficulty. BrainHQ monitors how well you handle each exercise and increases or decreases your level of difficulty based on your responses. Charts display your progress and how you compare to others, both in your age group and overall.
Brain Plasticity
Brain plasticity is the brain’s ability to rewire itself to improve the way different brain regions connect. BrainHQ’s goal is to increase that neuroplasticity. When I interviewed Henry Mahncke, PhD, the CEO of parent company Posit Science, he compared it to listening to the radio:
“As we get older our brains get noisier. If the signal drifts off a little bit that you’re tuned into or your tuning drifts off a little bit, you know, you get noise on the radio, right? And it gets staticky. If you’re listening to a music station it’s harder to hear the music, might take longer to figure out what song is playing or harder to hear what the DJ is saying. Noise is a problem for information processing. What happens as we get older is that our brains themselves get a source of internal noise. We don’t hear it like noise, but our information processing is happening in a noisy environment. Information has to punch through that noise and our brains have to work harder to process information in that noise. Brain HQ is designed to make the brain faster and more accurate. By making the brain faster and more accurate, it’s kind of like improving the signal and reducing the noise inside of your brain.”
About fatigue, Mahncke says BrainHQ is also designed to re-engage and strengthen neuromodulatory functions, which contribute to sleep/wake patterns, attention, and overall brain health. Doing this, he says, can help someone to generally feel better, to feel peppier.
Show Me the Research
According to the website, the mathematical model for BrainHQ was based on a National Institutes of Health-funded study called ACTIVE, which showed that healthy older adults can make significant cognitive improvements with appropriate cognitive training and practice. The website lists hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers that report on the ability of tools such as BrainHQ to provide this training. Some of them specifically refer to BrainHQ and MS:
- On May 11, 2017, a study published in PLOS reported that 12 weeks of training with the research version of BrainHQ—which provided 15 exercises targeting speed, attention, working memory, and executive function—was superior to playing ordinary computer games for improving cognitive functioning in participants with MS.
- A study of 51 people with MS published in the September 2019 issue of Multiple Sclerosis and Related Disorders reported that after 12 weeks of using BrainHQ, a group of patients improved significantly after training. The group’s mean Symbol Digit Modalities Test (SDMT) score improved from 49.6±14.7 to 52.6±15.6 (t =3.91, P <0.001), and greater improvement correlated with treatment exposure.
- A smaller, shorter study published in the June 3, 2019, issue of Multiple Sclerosis International found significant improvements observed in verbal, some measures of processing speed, and a measure of executive function.
Out in the Real World
Mahncke told me users of the app have reported outcomes such as feeling like the fog is lifting, feeling sharper in terms of what they see or hear, or they can more easily remember a phone number. But it takes time. According to Mahncke, some people notice benefits after 4 or 5 hours of training. Some people notice after 10. It’s like physical exercise, Mahncke says, “It takes a little bit to start to kick in.”
I completed 15 training sessions, each session lasting 20 to 30 minutes. I’ve found that I need to concentrate so hard, it’s draining to go longer. I’ve seen improvements in my scores after each session, and a bit of a slide if I miss a few days between them, but I’m not sure if I actually feel sharper, less fatigued, or better able to remember something. Like the physical exercises I regularly do, however, I’m going to keep going and see where I wind up. If nothing else, as I wrote earlier, it’s fun, challenging, and sometimes frustrating. And it just might help my brain.