What is brainmaxing? (also spelled brainmaxxing)

The ending is older than the word. The suffix means pushing one thing as far as it will go; its double-x form came out of message-board communities in the 2010s, where looksmaxxing meant maximising physical attractiveness, and the single-x form has a separate ancestry in game jargon. Through the early 2020s it attached itself to everything, and eventually to this — which is why the spelling is unsettled.

The popular definition was written down in 2026. A widely read guide published that June defines it as “the viral practice of deliberately optimizing your mind the way looksmaxing optimizes appearance”. In March an astrophysicist writing for a general audience called it the mental descendant of lifehacking, and argued that the version being sold is shortcut promises and the real thing is unglamorous work.

So the term carries two things at once: a reasonable idea — that the conditions for thinking well can be worked on — and a marketplace that grew faster than the evidence. The rest of this page separates them.

Sleep is the largest, and not a lifestyle flourish. A meta-analysis pooling 823 effect sizes from 271 samples found material studied before an interval containing sleep retained better than before an equally long waking interval: g = 0.44, and g = 0.28 once selective reporting was accounted for. Restricting adults to four or six hours in bed for fourteen nights produced cumulative lapses of attention — while they rated their own sleepiness as rising far less than their performance fell.

Retrieval practice is the second. Pulling material back out of memory without the page in front of you retains better a day and a week later than re-reading for the same time, although re-reading feels more productive. The caveat is the outcome: it is replicated on recall of studied material.

Spacing is the third and pairs with the second: practice across separated sessions retains better than the same practice massed, and the best gap grows with the delay you are aiming at. Mixing problem kinds within a session — interleaving — has a smaller, less settled result, and is graded lower here rather than promoted to sit beside the other two.

Aerobic exercise has evidence in one named population: a review with meta-analysis found structured exercise associated with better cognitive-test performance in adults older than 50. Nothing in it is about anyone younger. It is here because it costs nothing and the result is real, stated at its actual size.

Removing an interruption has a smaller result than the internet believes. A notification impaired performance on an attention-demanding task even when the phone was never touched — a finding about the notification, not about owning a device.

The biggest is transfer — the implied promise that getting better at a brain game makes you better at something else. Practice does improve the task practised and reaches tasks that closely resemble it. Beyond that the evidence thins and reverses: a review of the field found extensive evidence for the trained tasks, less for closely related ones, and little that training reaches distantly related tasks or everyday performance; a meta-analytic review of 87 publications found no convincing evidence of an effect on ability measures or academic skills. Against active controls the effect is near zero — evidence against, not an open question, and this site is built on it: training a game trains the game.

A regulator tested this in public. 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 product is forbidden to make.

The second is supplements as a shortcut. Across 28 studies and more than 83,000 people, a Cochrane review found no evidence that any vitamin or mineral strategy meaningfully affects cognitive decline in healthy adults — the largest result of its kind, and a null. A proprietary multi-ingredient stack is worse than unproven: it is definitionally not the thing any trial tested.

Finally, the famous phone-on-the-desk claim — that a phone merely present but unused reduces available capacity. A pre-registered replication did not reproduce it and a meta-analysis found a pooled effect of g = −0.14. It is kept here rather than quietly dropped, because deleting it would leave you the headline you already believe and nothing to doubt it with.

A grade belongs to one claim in one population, never to a topic or a page, and the weakest link is printed in the same row so it cannot be read apart from it.

This is the graded material above in an order a person can run. Nothing on it requires a purchase, an app or a supplement — a rule this product holds itself to. It is deliberately short: the evidence supports a handful of things, so an honest week built from it is small, and anything longer would be padding.

Days 2 and 7 point here, free. The Snapshot is scored in your browser, the bench needs no account, and the method page publishes the weight table.

“Brainmaxing exercises” usually means short timed tasks. This site publishes fifteen, free and with no account, and the honest sentence about all fifteen is the same: training these tasks makes you better at these tasks. A score records that task, that day, that device, and is compared with your own earlier runs and nobody else's. They are worth running for a reason that needs no transfer claim: a repeatable reading is how you notice a fortnight of short nights has cost you something.

Training these tasks makes you better at these tasks. That sentence is the whole claim, printed under every game; Does brainmaxing work? The evidence, graded, Brainmaxing exercises: what each one trains, A brainmaxing routine for one week, How to start thinking about a problem, Why training a game trains the game and What the evidence says about creatine and thinking take the evidence for it, and against everything larger.

There is no useful ranking of these to give you and this page will not invent one. What is useful is the list you can check yourself against any of them, including this one.

Does it publish how a score is produced? Does it refuse to give you one number for your mind — a general ability figure, a brain age, a percentile? Nobody can rank you honestly without naming who you were ranked against. Does it say what a result does not mean on the same screen as the result? Is any advice conditional on buying something? And when you delete your data, does it go?

Brainmaxing is one option, built against that list: the scoring rules are published, there is no general ability score and no percentile in it, the limits sit beside the result, no protocol step requires a purchase, and deleting your data deletes it.