Syllable Stacks

Do you ever look up a phone number, only to forget part of it before you finish dialing? Remembering that phone number long enough to dial it relies on the working memory processes of your brain. “Working memory” is the very short-term memory that’s often described as a “scratch pad” for your brain. Working memory keeps information—a number, name, or whatever else—on hand just long enough to use or store. The brain’s working memory processes contribute to many aspects of more complicated behaviors, making their improvement a key brain training target.

Syllable Stacks is a “serial memory-span” exercise from BrainHQ’s Memory category. It sharpens working memory by requiring the brain to remember more and more pieces of information, even as those pieces of information get more similar (or in other words, easier for your brain to confuse). 

Your task in Syllable Stacks is to listen to a series of sounds then repeat them in order.

Here’s how the exercise works:

1. A speaker icon will appear on screen to indicate that audio clips are being played. A voice will state a few short words. Remember the order in which the words are given.
   
2. When the audio is done playing, several buttons with words will appear on screen.
   
3. Click the buttons in the order that you heard the spoken words.

If an incorrect answer is given, you’ll hear a “bonk” sound and you may be asked to remember fewer words in following turns. If a correct answer is given, you’ll hear a “boop” sound and you may be asked to remember more words in following turns. In both cases, the level then continues, repeating from Step 1 above.

You can review the exercise video tutorial below:

Syllable Stacks from BrainHQ from Posit Science on Vimeo.

As you progress through Syllable Stacks, it becomes more challenging in these ways:

• The syllables get closer and closer together, giving your brain less time to record each one.
• The syllables you hear gradually transition from slow, highly processed speech to speech that is even faster than normal.
• At times, the exercise will include distractors—buttons that don’t represent any of the sounds you heard.

As you do the exercise, you might wonder why our scientists included these particular syllables in Syllable Stack. The syllables represent common sound combinations in English, and they’ve been specially processed to help your brain sharpen its representation of the individual sounds in the syllables. A few added notes about the processed speech found in Syllable Stacks:

• The speech is processed natural speech instead of synthetic speech in part because there is a benefit to novelty and difference.
• Providing different examples of speech (male vs. female voices, different accents, different timing, etc.) is intended to give the brain practice with generalizing speech, so that the brain can identify a word regardless of who says it.

A common misconception is that the processed speech is trying to make speech more intelligible. It is not. People may even find the processed speech more difficult to understand than normal speech. The goal of the processed speech is to to target the parts of your brain that process sound and renormalize the neurons there, reteaching them to separate auditory events.

One more thing about Syllable Stacks: as you may have noticed, the exercise is one of many in BrainHQ that pounds on your brain’s auditory processing. We’ve included memory exercises that exercise all levels of listening, from phonemes (small parts of words), all the way up to full sentences. We’ve done this because for accurate sound reception—which is essential to a strong memory and other cognitive skills—your brain needs to sharpen its neurons from the bottom up. From the “low” level neurons that process frequency sweeps up through the “higher” level neurons that process the meaning of conversations, brain fitness requires that the whole system work as faultlessly as possible