Tricky questions and only 1 second to answer - check how smart are you

Do you wonder how smart are you? Can you improve your IQ or make your brain more agile? You may already know that your intelligence or mental skills are not a fixed IQ number, but rather an ability that may vary from day to day.

There are some moments when you are at your peak performance and flow and other when you experience a drop of your cognitive skills or a creative block. The key to success is to understand what factors may influence your concentration.

Can you escape your own weakness?

I’d like to offer you a puzzle that can help you understand different ways your brain works, in what circumstances you can achieve the flow and when it is better to take it easy. Your mental agility, focus and reaction speed can depend on many factors like the quality of your sleep, distractions or even your blood sugar level. With this brain game you can test your attention span, better understand yourself and be able to train your cognitive skills in a smarter way.

How to play:

You will see a simple question - for example “Is it true that 1+1=2?”. Your goal is to push the “true” button if the sentence of the screen is right - or “false” otherwise. The challenge is that you will start with only 2 seconds for every answer and that timespan will drop gradually until the task becomes impossible. You can try to beat your own record everyday and see how your reaction speed improves.

This game will challenge your brain on several ways:

- endurance - how long can you stay focused on fairly simple task with one bit of information to hold on your memory

- deep focus - how long you can keep your brain sharp if your tasks will be a bit harder and requiers to keep two bits of information at the same time

- simultaneous interpretation training - that is the hardest quiz that makes you keep several bits of information in your short memory while making some additional calculations on them at the same time. You can read more on this type of experiments in famous book “Thinking Fast and Slow”.

I recommend you to try this puzzle game in a three ways:

As a cognitive skill test. Try to beat your record in different moments of your day and in variety of circumstances. Record as many information on what could influence your score - for example if you are tired, hungry or under stress. See if you achieve better results in the morning or maybe late at night. Try to see the pattern when you achieve the best results and then improve with use of that knowledge.

As a writing block breaker. It is proven that playing games that required maximum attention improves the blood flow and oxygen delivery to the frontal cortex area of your brain. This kind of challenge works like a short sprint that creates an impulse to action. If you feel that you stuck on certain problem or you cannot move forward a great novel you are writing - playing this game can push you to action.

As a regular training. Playing regularly works like fitness for your brain. It will help you prevent cognitive performance drop due to aging, elevate your sharpness and ability to learn and even can unblock your hidden potential in with seemingly unrelated skills like self control or stress management.

One additional use:

You can play it just for fun. You can approach this app in more simple ways - as a way to make prank or trick your friends that this is a moron test. It can be fun to bring your friends a fever when at some point they will fail to answer the simplest questions. Remember though that from trying to be brilliant much more important is to make best of what you already have.