Memory Grid

Auditory processing is one of the most important building blocks of memory. Your brain needs to take in information with as much clarity as possible to store it accurately and recall it clearly later. As our brains get older, they can have trouble separating individual auditory events and sounds can get muddy. Memory Grid exercises auditory processing by helping your brain improve its ability to separate individual auditory events. As the brain improves at this skill, it will become better at perceiving and transmitting sound precisely—and at interpreting and recording it accurately.

Memory Grid is one of the exercises from BrainHQ’s Memory category, and it’s designed to challenge your brain to match more and more syllables and target memory by sharpening auditory processing. To separate auditory events, Memory Grid uses syllables that represent common sound combinations in English. They are natural speech that our scientists have carefully processed to engage the relevant processing machinery in the brain. The goal is to exercise your brain’s ability to separate auditory events in speech, and so your task in Memory Grid is to match cards representing syllables together.

Here’s how the exercise works:

1. Cards will appear on screen in a random pattern. At the bottom of this screen there is a countdown tracker.
   
2. Each card represents a syllable. Click on a card to hear the syllable. Each card you click will subtract one from the countdown tracker.
   
3. Continue to click cards on screen until you come across a syllable you’ve heard from another card. 
4. When you encounter a syllable you’ve heard before, try and match it to the other card that has the same syllable.
5. Continue matching cards until either there are no more cards present, or the countdown tracker has turned to 0.

Memory Grid is unique in how it decides whether an answer is correct or incorrect. If you do not match up all of the pairs of syllable cards before the countdown timer reaches 0, then you’ll be marked incorrect and you’ll hear a “bonk” sound. You may be asked to pair up fewer cards in following turns. If you match up all of the pairs of syllable cards before the countdown reaches 0 then you’ll hear a “boop” sound and you may be asked to pair up more cards in following turns. In both cases, the level then continues, repeating from Step 1 above.

You can review the exercise video tutorial below:

Memory Grid from BrainHQ from Posit Science on Vimeo.

As you progress through Memory Grid, it becomes more challenging in these ways:

• The syllables to match change, becoming more similar
• The speech processing decreases
• The voice varies: sometimes it will be a deeper voice, sometimes it will be a higher pitched voice.

A few additional notes about the processed speech found in Memory Grid: 

• 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.