Brain Zag is a "Color N-back" brain training app to improve your working memory. It's color only - the position is random and irrelevant. Focus on remembering the last N sequence of colors and hold them in your mind.
How to play - BrainZag.com
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Basic gameplay: You are shown a sequence of colors one at a time. Your goal is to identify if the current COLOR (not position) matches the one from N steps earlier in the sequence. For example in a 2-back game, if the sequence is: red, blue, red (current) - you would recognize the current red as a match to the red two steps before (2-back) -> click Match.
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In your mind try to update the information "going forward + looking backwards", given an example sequence: yellow, blue, red - update your mind with: [yellow], [blue -> yellow] and [red -> blue -> yellow].
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While playing, avoid trying to actively repeat the tiles very quickly in order to refresh them. Rather put them into different mind buckets, and let your brain manage them. It will automatically refresh/repeat them, but not you actively + consciously doing it. If you catch yourself speedy repeating them - stop it. Rather it should feel like your brain is pinging the buckets on its own, and you merely observe it happening. Overall, it should feel like that your bucket's information is quickly fading away - this "not fading" is what we train.
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Avoid any strategies and chunking.
- Adaptive difficulty: Brain Zag continuously models your ability using d' (d-prime) from Signal Detection Theory, separating true recall from lucky guessing. A feedback controller then adjusts four difficulty knobs in real time, so you always train right at the edge of your current capacity:
- the number of unique colors in your attention window
- match frequency
- stimulus speed
- transition unpredictability (Shannon entropy)
- Guided progression: after every N-level increase, a phase-gate system locks difficulty, so you can stabilize before the challenge ramps back up
- Responsive UI: doesn't look and feel like any other N-back app
- Heatmap and daily time progress bar: it is recommended that you train 20 minutes per day
- Dynamic grid layout: so it doesn't get boring
- Works fully offline: load the page once and it will keep working even without internet
The ability to store and manipulate information for short periods of time.
- Improving fluid intelligence with training on working memory
- A meta-analysis (youtube video presentation)
An improved working memory will help you to learn faster, remember more, solve novel problems and stay focused longer. Together this can improve your performance on exams/tests:
- Suneung 🇰🇷
- Todai 🇯🇵
- Gaokao 🇨🇳
- Raven’s - Wechsler Scales (WAIS) - Stanford-Binet
- NEET - JEE Advanced - UPSC CSE 🇮🇳
- BMAT - MCAT - USMLE - LSAT 🇬🇧 / 🇺🇸
- Leetcode - Coding - Job interviews
Most N-back apps/websites are "dual-n-back" and focus on position + audio stimuli. BrainZag however is purely color. Playing any N-back game requires you to hold and update information in your mind. Your brain is very efficient and smart and will always find a way to make your task easier:
- position-n-back: with increasing N level your brain will automatically try to cache the information and instead of actively recalling the last N positions you will tend to remember swipe motions like unlocking your phone.
- audio-n-back: your brain will attempt to chunk or try to lean on common abbreviations. Also how do you play this on the go in the bus/train ?
- shape-n-back: now it gets harder to cache and condense the information-stimuli, your brain will result to chunking a little story e.g. turtle -> house -> sun, turns into "a turtle came into the house on a sunny day"
We dont want to make it easier for the brain! We want to prevent automatic chunking and strategies to condense information.
Color N-back gives us that, how do you chunk a bunch of colors? Apart from a traffic light, your two favourite colors and a few country flags its very hard to use a strategy to condense/cache >3 colors in your mind.
Evolutionary, position and audio input is optimized for survival: movement, communication, orientation. While color is more abstract for the brain, we might react strongly to immediate colors (red blood, blue sky) but holding a sequence of different color combinations is very hard for the brain.
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