Is Brainmaxing legit?

Brainmaxing is an educational website with two free things at its centre. The Cognitive Skills Snapshot is six questions about your habits and circumstances; it suggests which of six areas — focus, memory, learning, cognitive control, recovery or environment — is most likely to repay attention first, and gives you a seven-day protocol for it. The bench is fifteen short browser games, each measuring one task.

It is not an IQ test: it gives no general ability score, no rank and no percentile. It is not medical: nothing here diagnoses, treats or prevents any condition. The Snapshot tells you what your answers suggest, and a game reports how you did on that game, on that day, on that device.

Brainmaxing is run by a UK private limited company. Its registered name, company number and registered office are printed on the Terms, the Privacy notice and the Contact page, and this page links there rather than repeat them.

The site publishes no testimonials, no star ratings and no expert endorsements, because none of them would be something you could check.

All fifteen games on the bench are free to play, with no account. A free account saves five of them; a paid plan saves every one. The Snapshot, your Brain Profile and the seven-day protocol are free on every plan. The free plan is not a trial: it does not end, it does not start charging you, and no payment method is held for it.

Two plans are paid: Core at $12 a month or $96 a year; Premium at $24 a month or $192 a year. Amounts are in USD. The plans page shows what each plan includes before you choose, and checkout shows the price again before you pay.

A subscription renews until you cancel it, and cancelling is done online from Your plan, in the same number of steps it took to subscribe. Paid plans are not on sale in every country yet; the plans page says where, and the Terms say why.

Refunds follow the rule the Terms state. If you are a consumer in the UK or the EEA, you have 14 days from starting your first subscription to withdraw for any reason, and you get back everything you paid, with nothing deducted for the days you used. Elsewhere you have whatever cooling-off right your own law gives, and never less. For everybody, a first subscription started by mistake is refunded, less the card-processing fee our payment provider keeps, if you say so within two days of that first payment. Otherwise cancelling stops the next charge and does not refund a period that has already begun.

This page grades nothing itself. The page on what brainmaxing is grades ten claims one at a time, each with the population it was measured in and its weakest link: four strong, one moderate, two preliminary and three insufficient.

In that table, sleep, retrieval practice and spaced practice are graded strong; structured exercise is graded moderate, and only in adults older than 50; and three ideas are graded insufficient: the phone that merely sits on the desk, far transfer (the idea that practising one task improves abilities you never practised) and vitamin or mineral supplements as a shortcut. Each grade here is read from that table, so none can sit higher here than there.

Three claims appear nowhere in the site's own voice. No IQ or general ability score: a handful of questions and a timed task cannot measure one. No percentile or ranking against other people: no norming sample stands behind any number here. And no claim that practising a game improves anything except that game. Practising a task makes you better at that task.

The reason is on the public record. In January 2016 the company behind the largest brain-training brand agreed to pay two million dollars to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it had advertised gains at work and at school without the science to support them. Every claim in that complaint is one this site is built not to make. The science points the same way: a review of the field published that year found little evidence that training reaches distantly related tasks or everyday performance.

The Snapshot is scored in your browser: you can read your whole result without an account, an email address or your answers being sent anywhere.

With an account, Settings has a control that downloads a complete copy of your data as a machine-readable file, and a control that deletes the account. Deleting removes your saved results, your history, your runs, your progress, your community content, your billing records on our side and your sessions. It cannot be undone.

Records of a payment are kept by Stripe under its own obligations as well as ours, and Stripe keeps them on its own terms for its own legal and tax purposes. Deleting your Brainmaxing account removes our copy; it does not and cannot reach into Stripe's records. The Privacy notice sets out how long everything else is kept.

Read the method page: it publishes the weight every Snapshot answer carries, generated from the file the scoring runs on, so you can work your result out by hand.

Open any source: every graded claim sits beside its sources, each with a link and the date it was checked, and every note under Resources says whether it has been reviewed.

Play a game without an account, then read what its page says the number means. If the two disagree, the Contact page is where to say so.