Two popular “brain tests” answer different questions. The Brain Care Score from Mass General Brigham asks: How well am I caring for my brain over months and years? The games on this site ask: How did I perform on attention, memory, or speed in the last few minutes?
The McCance Brain Care Score is a 21-point index built from 12 modifiable domains — sleep, exercise, social ties, blood pressure, and similar inputs. You fill it out occasionally (or with your doctor) to see whether your habits and vitals line up with what epidemiology says protects against stroke, dementia, and depression. It does not time your reactions or show interference effects.
Our battery is built from short, repeatable paradigms used in research:
Stroop — selective attention and inhibition (reading vs naming color). Flanker — filtering distracting flankers. 2-back — working memory updating. Go/No-Go — stopping a prepotent response. PVT — sustained alertness and lapses.
Scores swing with sleep, stress, caffeine, and practice. That is a feature if you log in and save results: you get a trend line for cognitive performance, not a one-time “brain age.”
Use the Brain Care Score when you want a structured look at long-horizon prevention — especially with a clinician who can interpret blood pressure, lipids, and A1c. Use cognitive tests here when you want a quick, repeatable probe of how sharp you feel today, or to compare weeks during a sleep experiment, supplement trial, or training block.
They complement each other: improve sleep (BCS) and you may see faster Stroop times; run the Daily Challenge regularly and you build performance history while you work on habits.
Neither tool diagnoses disease. Low scores or bad days are data for you and your doctor — not labels. Read why repeat testing helps for how we think about trends on this site.
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