Participate in The Great Brain Experiment by Downloading an App

The Great Brain Experiment sounds like an excellent idea in theory. Created by a team of British neuroscientists from University College London, the ambitious project intends to be a global effort to understand the brain better, by making everyone a subject — or at least everyone with a smartphone.

The Great Brain Experiment is actually an app, you see, and it became available for download today for the enticingly low price of free dollars. Despite my headline, the app comes for both iPhone and Android, though I was only able to test out the former. And it’s actually pretty well designed. 

When you open up the Great Brain Experiment, you’re met with a series of screens explaining the project and its ambitions. Basically, the UCL team hopes to break from convention by offering subjects a way to participate that does not involve being stuffed into an MRI machine and paid to play video games. You probably participated in a study like this at some point in college — “Wait, I get $50 and a picture of my brain? Where do I sign up?!” — but researchers are actually a little weary of just running tests on college students. It’s necessarily restrictive, and who knows what they’re missing from the general population.

So this cartoonish app is supposed to fix all that. Two cute little scientist characters guide you through four different games that are supposed to test your wits and also collect a bunch of data about what your brain is doing while you’re solving simple problems. The first challenge tests your memory and comes in the form of a grid where red and yellow circles pop up. The app asks you to remember the red ones and pick the slots that they were in after they disappear. It’s kind of hard, and I lasted approximately 15 seconds. 

The second game is supposed to measure your impulsivity by testing how well you do at exploding fruit that’s falling from a tree. This one’s remarkably easy, if you’ve ever played Fruit Ninja because it’s essentially a much easier version of the same game. Just like in Fruit Ninja there are bad fruits, except rather than being disguised as bombs, they just look like rotten fruit.

The game judges how impulsive you are, I imagine, by seeing how many times you screw up and explode bad fruit. While this one was much easier than the memory test, I also lost interest after about 15 seconds and went on to the fourth challenge: “How much do I see?”

This is when my mind started to wander. How in the world does this app know what’s going on in my brain if I’m just tapping my iPhone screen and wishing I were playing Fruit Ninja instead? It’s all about the data, says one member of the research team.

“Our app brings ‘big data’ to neuroscience, promising unprecedented insights into how we think and act, and how people differ from each other,” Harriet Brown, a Ph.D. candidate and game designer, said in a statement. “The Great Brain Experiment is one of a new generation of neuroscience experiments that ‘gamify’ data collection and crowdsource it to gain a wider audience.”

Sounds good in theory, but boy, do I wish the app were more exciting. The data from the Great Brain Experiment will only get big if a lot of people download and use this thing. It reminds me of a similar app that British scientists released a little over a year ago called Dream:ON.

Like the Great Brain Experiment, Dream:ON was supposed to be a massive, crowdsourced brain study but with a more psychological twist. Basically, the app was supposed to help manipulate your dreams, and then you were supposed to write down what happened in a little journal that was shared with the scientists. In the first night, it already had 100,000. It also asked you to buy stuff in the app that would expand your ability to control your dreams. I downloaded the app, tried it several times and still had my same old boring dreams. But at least I donated a little bit of data to science.

The rest of the Great Brain Experiment inevitably makes you wonder what makes smartphone games successful. What exactly does Fruit Ninja do to our brains that makes it so addictive? Ditto for Angry Birds. Temple Run sounds boring when a friend explains it to you, but the next thing you know, you’re missing your subway stops in an impossible attempt to run the perfect run.

In a super simplistic way, the Great Brain Experiment sheds a little bit of light on these challenges. The circle game is so hard it scared me away. The fruit game is way too easy. The third game, another memory challenge that flashes images on the screen and asks you to remember certain ones, is actually pretty fun.

I wondered if I could beat my friends and whether badges would be awarded at some point. It was so fun, I only tried out the fourth game, a spinner thing that’s supposed to gauge your happiness, for a few seconds, before going back to the image-spotting fun. 

The big question that remains is how long this brief fascination with a simple challenge will last before a subject starts feeling like a subject and expecting a real reward. At some point, I feel like I’m going to want $50 and a picture of my brain. But maybe the neuroscientists will come up with something even better. Hopefully, that won’t be a badge.