I've been working on "brain training" stuff for almost 8 years and just recently (around a year ago) decided to make a startup out of it. I'm a psychologist and

I've been working on "brain training" stuff for almost 8 years and just recently (around a year ago) decided to make a startup out of it. I'm a psychologist and software engineer and my cofounder is a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist. We've done our own research (and have a published paper), read a lot of the stuff that's out there and have evaluated and kept track of the existing products for years. First thing that baffles me on most commercial products is the frequency and duration of each training session. Let's think for a minute. On average you have this short sessions that range from 5 to 15 minutes. Even in something as evident as physical activity... how fit can you get by doing 15 minutes of low intensity jogging on average 3 times a week? How fair is to say based on that example that jogging is "worthless"? That said, most critiques to Brain Fitness are correct. If I could summarize what we've learned so far: - Transfer effect (i.e. to gain benefits outside of the activity you're doing) is hard to achieve, it takes a lot of time, has to be a n-back and heavy working memory activity (is the only think I can think of having a chance to do transfer) and it doesn't work all the time. On our own experience probably 20% of the population will never benefit from something like this. Also, transfer is limited to some executive functions, not all of them. - Training duration and frequency. Think of a physical activity like jogging but instead of doing 15 minutes of low intensity jogging 3 times a week, do 35 high speed jogging 4 times a week for two months. You will get fit. - Training activity. Most n-back and working memory stuff is boring and hard to do for players. It's difficult to engage on a "game" like that and the dropout rate for users is very high. Most games out there that are part of the package of games in brain training softwares are based on stuff that has not been proved to have any transfer effect. Our mobile app will focus mostly on working memory and sustained attention games (fewer but with more complex game dynamics that current ones). And I don't think we will advertise it as a "life changer" or a way to "make you smarter". We just want to build a suite of games for people to be challenged and have fun while doing so.