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Brainmaxing

Cognitive Skills Snapshot

Train the mechanism, not the mood.

Most advice about thinking better stops at the surface. Brainmaxing (also written brainmaxxing) starts underneath it, with the four capacities that decide how you focus, retain, learn and follow through, and with what you can actually change about them.

Play the bench — fifteen games, free

Six questionsNo accountScored in your browser

01 / The surface

Nothing useful is visible from here.

Sleep, stress load, training and attention all leave measurable signatures. None of them show on the outside. So we go through it.

02 / Beneath the surface

Structure first.

Cognitive capacity is the behaviour of physical structures: tissue with a blood supply, a recovery schedule, and properties that shift slowly under load rather than quickly under intention.

03 / Bone

Shaped around a single job.

That job is protecting an organ that never idles — one that keeps spending whether or not you are deliberately using it.

~2% of body mass · ~20% of resting energy

04 / The vault

Eight bones, fused into one shell.

The calvaria is the roof of that vault — a single curved plate over the top of the brain, thin enough to be efficient and strong enough to matter. Everything after this sits underneath it.

05 / The mechanism

Roughly 86 billion neurons.

Regions that specialise, connections that strengthen with what you repeat, and a maintenance schedule that is mostly sleep.

~86 billion neurons · ~20 W sustained

06 / Focus

Directs attention

Attention is a selection you keep making, and an interruption costs you finding your place again. You can change what interrupts you.

Sustained attention under interruption.

May support

07 / Memory

Stores memory

Getting something in takes a minute; keeping it takes days, much of that while you sleep. You can space your reviews across them.

Encoding, consolidation and recall.

Evidence supports

08 / Learning

Builds skill

How long since something you do without thinking was hard? Practice moves the task you practise, so you can choose which task.

How quickly practice becomes automatic.

May support

09 / Control

Holds the plan

Holding a plan is mostly a starting problem, and a hard week shows here first. You can decide what the first step is.

Planning, inhibition and follow-through.

May support

10 / All four

Four capacities, one system.

They are not independent. Attention decides what reaches memory, memory decides what learning has to work with, and control decides whether any of it survives contact with a normal week.

11 / Your starting point

Where are you actually starting from?

Six questions about your habits and circumstances — not a test of ability. Your answers suggest which of the four is most likely to repay attention first, and the seven-day plan follows from that.

12 / Going further

Then keep the parts that work.

The snapshot and the seven-day plan are free and stay free. If you want the longer programme afterwards, the terms are below in full.