Ever wondered if you could turn back the clock on your brain’s age and reclaim mental clarity? Brain training just got a serious upgrade with Thinkie System, a revolutionary technology that promises to sharpen your mind and potentially shave years off your cognitive age. In this episode, we’re diving deep with Nicholas White, a key figure from Thinkie System, as he unveils the science behind their innovative sensor and brain-training games. Nick explains how their system, based on decades of research and development, offers real-time feedback to optimize your cognitive exercises, making your brain work smarter, not just harder. Whether you’re looking to boost your memory, increase focus, or simply maintain your mental sharpness as you age, this conversation with Nick is packed with actionable insights and fascinating discoveries about the power of neuroplasticity and the potential of this cutting-edge technology. Tune in to learn how just a few minutes a day could transform your brain health and longevity.
The information presented in Fully Alive is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before making changes to your health regimen. Guests’ opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host, production team, or sponsors.
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Boost Your Brain Power: Innovative Brain Training With Thinkie System With Nick White
Welcome back to Fully Alive, where we are unlocking the secrets to your healthier, happier, and longer life. I’m your host, Zach Gurick. If you’ve ever wondered how to keep your brain as strong and sharp as your body as you age, then you’re in for a powerful conversation. We talked a lot on this show about physical vitality, nutrition, and even the science of sleep. We’re diving deep into something just as critical for healthy longevity, your brain.
Our guest is the Chief Marketing Officer of a revolutionary company called Thinkie. It’s combining cutting-edge neuroscience, wearable technology, and AI to optimize your cognitive health. Thinkie’s system uses real-time brain data, not guesswork, to help you improve focus, memory, and mental resilience through neurofeedback and something called fNIRS or Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy. Yes, I did have to look up what that meant as well.
In this episode, we’re going to explore how brain training can reverse the biological signs of aging, what it means to train your brain like you train your body, and how you can change your life in just a few minutes a day, and then what’s coming next in the world of personalized brain optimization. Whether you’re a high performer, a caregiver, or simply someone who wants to age with clarity and confidence, this episode will equip you with science-backed insights to live more fully, mentally and physically. Sit back, take a breath, and let’s unlock the secrets to a sharper, longer life.
Nick, thanks so much for being on the show. It’s a privilege and honor to have you with us. I’m excited for our audience to learn about Thinkie and the amazing breakthrough technology that you guys are developing and promoting. Thanks for the great work you’re doing and for being here.
Thank you.
What Exactly Is Thinkie & How Does It Work
Maybe kick us off. Most people probably haven’t heard about Thinkie. Can you break it down for us a little bit? What exactly is it? Give us a brief overview of how it works.
What Thinkie is designed to do is to train the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that takes everything else the brain is doing. It helps meter that out so that you interact with the world and then respond, and how you respond to that interaction. It governs executive function, essentially, all the way. Think of it as the control tower of the brain, or the bridge. Everything that you are doing to interact with the world has to go through the prefrontal cortex, then back through as you feel through that.
It governs things like short-term memory, concentration, attention switching, mental processing speed, and all the things that, unfortunately, tend to decline with age as well. Those are the noticeable forms of decline. We term those as some form of dementia. The proof of the cortex is interesting. It’s the last part of the brain to develop, not until you’re about in your mid-20s. There’s a real reason why rental cars won’t rent to young men under 25, because their prefrontal cortices are not fully developed. Their judgment is rather impaired.
Unfortunately, it then starts to deteriorate after age 30 or 35. It can get noticeable. It can be gradual. It depends on the individual. Being over 50, I have noticed that there is some slower recognition that I need to train myself to keep up with where I hope and expect that my brain would be and what I’ve gotten used to. We’ve created a tool that’s a sensor. It is about the size of a cigarette lighter. It weighs 30 grams. You wear it in a headband on your forehead.
It senses the changes in blood flow to your prefrontal cortex. You would wear it above one eyebrow or the other, because that’s where the lobes of the prefrontal cortex exist, and then we give you a stimulus. You play 1 of 19 different games that are focused on processing speed, memory, attention switching, concentration, and so on. You play those games, and you improve your score over time. The score game gets adaptive. If you start doing well, it ups the difficulty level and makes things more difficult.
From day to day, you may not have your cognition sharp, and so it’ll make things a little bit easier for you, so that the goals are still attainable. The idea is to stimulate your brain and then, through the sensor, see exactly how much work your brain is doing with the given exercise. Those exercises where you score highly, you want to do more of because they’re challenging for you. Those where you get a low score, it’s like golf in a certain way. Those where you get a low score, you want to stay away from. They’re not stimulating your brain on that particular day, or in that particular manner, in a way that’s useful for you.
What’s interesting about Thinkie is that not only do you have the sensor with the neuroscientist-designed games, but you can also do anything else. Let’s say you already have a routine where you like to play Sudoku or the New York Times crossword puzzle, you may next play the piano or learn Spanish. Anything that you’re already doing to stimulate your brain and improve your cognition, the Thinkie sensor will tell you exactly how hard your brain is working throughout that session, and whether that’s going to be a beneficial exercise for you.
Brain Exercise & Real Time Feedback: Strengthen Neural Synapses
We were together at the NextMed conference a couple of weeks ago, where I got to try this out. The screen is changing colors as my brain is working in different ways, playing the game. What you’re saying is you want those harder activities for your brain because that strengthens it. Tell us a little bit about how it works at the brain level. Do we have new neurons being generated, and those can be strengthened, and the neural synapses can be strengthened, so we can improve our memory and cognitive functions by playing these games?
Yeah. Exactly.
Okay. It’s like exercise for your brain.
Yeah. One of our customers called it yoga for your brain. That’s one good way to look at it. When you exercise physically, you get a physical response. You know that you’re exerting yourself, and if you’re dogging it, you know that you’re dogging it as well, and not exerting yourself. You get that immediate feedback, and your body knows. It can tell you very quickly whether you’re going to get something beneficial out of that exercise or not.
It’s not the case with the brain. The brain doesn’t have a real-time feedback mechanism. You need to wear a sensor on it like ours that will tell you this is an exercise that’s good for you, or this is an exercise where you’re spinning your wheels and not getting as much out of it as maybe you think you are. That happens a lot. People play Sudoku and find that they level up very quickly. What happens is that neuroplasticity takes over, and you get habituated. You get good at something as you practice.
One of the phenomena of the human brain is that with practice, we get better at things. That’s great, but that level of challenge does not stay consistent for you. You need a consistent level of a challenge that’s going to be attainable and yet something that’s just within your grasp that’s going to make you stretch and reach for it.
The neuroplasticity, when that kicks in, what we’re trying to do is promote neuroplasticity, so that you form new connections and strengthen the existing connections. That’s very much what happens in a child’s brain while they’re developing up to the age of 25, as I mentioned. They are building those synapses and those neural connections, and then that stops. You can restart that process, and you can rejuvenate those connections, but it takes work, just like anything else in life.
To do that, you need to stimulate your brain in a way that is going to be challenging, yet attainable for you. That real-time feedback is the key. The brain training apps out there, there are tons of them, but very few, if any, have a sensor that will tell you exactly how hard your particular brain is working. They can give you historical data or how other people have responded, how other people score on a game, and then figure out where you fit in that bell curve. That’s not important when it comes down to each one of us. Our brain is our particular, unique brain. As individuals, we want to care for it in the best way possible. The only way you know whether what you’re doing is something that’s going to be beneficial to you is if you get feedback, so you need a sensor like Thinkie.
That’s what sets Thinkie apart from every other brain game out there. You could be good at something and you’re not actually stressing or putting that strain on your brain to strengthen it, but here, you know you know that you are. That’s fantastic. You showed me some amazing data, outcomes, and results. Tell us a little bit about what you guys are seeing as far as the results of people who are using Thinkie.
30 Years In The Making: The Science Behind Thinkie’s Innovation
A little bit about Thinkie first, the sensor has been under development since 1995, so for 30 years. We’re a Japanese company originally. We’re breaking away from our Japanese ownership, and the principals of the business are buying out the business. Thinkie started as an experiment with Hitachi, Tohoku University, and Mitsui, who is our former owner in Japan, trying to build NIRS or near-infrared spectroscopy-based sensors to be used in healthcare.
When it comes down to it, each of us has a unique brain, and as individuals, we want to care for it in the best way possible. The only way to really know if what you're doing is beneficial is if you get feedback. Share on X
Thirty years ago, Hitachi started out on this path. In about 10 to 15 years, they were able to build a medical-grade sensor that sells for about $200,000. It’s about the size of the desk that you’re sitting at right now, and it only has a clinical application to it. Over the next 10 to 15 years, they managed to miniaturize it to get it down to the size of something that you can put in your pocket. That’s where the R&D has gone into the hardware.
The software comes from a doctor named Kawashima in Japan, who is part of Kumon. If you’re familiar with the Kumon learning process. There are learning centers around the country. He has been studying neuroscience. He is an MD and a neuroscientist, and that has been his career for probably 40 years. Twenty years ago, he put out what’s called a Brain Age series on Nintendo. Some people may remember that, but it was a way to train and test your brain on Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo DS. It sold over 30 million copies, but it didn’t have a sensor. The genius of Thinkie is putting the two together.
Dr. Kawashima is our advisor. He was an advisor on the sensor. He’s an advisor on our software, but his idea was to put the two together to take the software that will stimulate your brain, take the hardware that will give you real-time feedback, and give you a product that will tell you exactly how your brain is working at any given minute.
In the course of that time in the last five years, we’ve conducted three randomized controlled trials. One at the Tohoku University in Japan, another at the University of Lorraine in France, and another at the University of California in Santa Barbara. Across three different continents, we have tested this with statistically significant sample sizes, and shown that when you have real-time feedback versus a test case of no real-time feedback or a control case of say Tetris, a lot of people think that Tetris is a great way to stimulate your brain, but what happens, much like Sudoku, is you get habituated. You get better at it. You don’t notice that because it’s gradual.
Without that real-time feedback, you think that the game got easier for you. It did, but that also means it’s less work. Your muscles get stronger, your heart gets stronger, and you exert yourself less. That’s good. To exert yourself to get that same level, you now have to work harder. Those randomized controlled trials across those three different universities showed that you get better results if you stimulate your brain with real-time feedback, like the sensor. You get slightly less results if you have no real-time feedback.
You can still get results, but you’re not going to get what you would hope for. You’re not going to use your time optimally. If you play Tetris, you get almost nothing. This is over the course of about a 60-day period. We have what we call brain age. It’s an assessment where, when you first start using Thinkie, it tells you where your brain age lines up with your chronological age. More or less, they’re about parallel. Sometimes people are a little bit ahead or behind in that.
We have real-world data that shows that people who’ve used Thinkie over the course of three months can bring that brain age number down by almost four years. I’m 52. I would have the brain of a 48-year-old, which is nice to think about, if I were to use Thinkie consistently for 10 to 15 minutes a day, 3 to 4 times a week, over 90 days. That cohort longitudinally, we followed them for 1, 2, and 3 years. In one year, these users took a decade off their brain age.
They have used Thinkie consistently, but it’s like exercise. You know what you get out of it and what you put into it. If you’re going to try and improve your physique, you need to work hard. Thinkie helps you work hard, but 10 to 15 minutes, 3 to 4 times a day, is not asking you a whole heck of a lot to be able to regain and maintain the cognition that you had better part of a decade ago.
It’s 10 to 15 minutes, 3 to 4 times a week.
Yes, for 90 days.
It’s like, every other day, ten minutes.
The thing is, you can use our games, and people love to play them. We’ve got nineteen different games, or you can go do something else. You just make sure that you’re stimulating your brain in a way that’s going to be useful and rejuvenating for it. You don’t have to do the games that we provide. You can untether yourself from the app and go do something else entirely.
We’ve got people who are in senior centers, and they love to tell stories about the past. Everybody is wearing a Thinkie sensor. One person is regaling the audience with their story, and everybody else is forming a mental picture in their own minds. That’s a good way in a group setting to stimulate your brain, in a way that has nothing in the end to do with our app.
We have other people who started learning Spanish and wearing Thinkie while they were doing that. Another person sight-reads and plays the piano while they’re wearing it. We have an eighteen-year-old student from the University of Washington here in Seattle who did that. You saw his brain activity peak as he was sight-reading and playing a Chopin piece. Other people will knit, crochet, or play chess. The opportunities are endless. The ideas are anything that you want to pursue. You just want to make sure that while you’re doing it, you’re getting the cognitive exercise and the stretching of that cognition that you’re looking for.
That’s amazing. Using this for every other day for a year, I could improve my brain age by ten years. I could go back to being the way my brain was ten years ago as a 35-year-old.
Yes. That’s not a clinical diagnosis. It’s the game that we’ve created an algorithm and gamified it to give you an assessment, but it is built by a neuroscientist, by Dr. Kawashima, and it is the same basis of the game that he sold on Nintendo over 30 million copies some twenty years ago. It’s not a medical or clinical moniker. It is something that very much gives you a meaningful target to shoot at, to then lower. Pretty much everybody who has used it consistently has come back and told us, “I feel sharper. I don’t walk into a room and forget why I did that. I remember where the car keys are.” All those sorts of things that tend to get a little bit fuzzy with age start to come back rather quickly.
That’s amazing. It makes me think about if you’re weight lifting and you’re doing the bench press. When you do the same weight every day or every time you bench press, it becomes easier. You’re not growing your muscles. This is the same idea that you keep increasing.
It’s the same idea. If you sprint for a couple of days a week for several months, then you’ll get faster. You’ll cover that ground faster. Same idea.
Thinkie’s Target Audience: Cognitive Health For Normal Functioning Brains
What about people who have some sort of cognitive impairment? It sounds like this works for young children and much older people as well. What about somebody who already has some signs of dementia, a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, or some mild cognitive impairments? Can we see improvements there?
Thinkie is designed for people with a normally functioning brain. It’s not designed to reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer’s or dementia, and it’s also not geared towards children because their brains are in such a neuroplastic state. We have kids come and play with Thinkie all the time. It’s certainly not going to hurt them, but they essentially pay the meter at 100 the entire time that they’re there because their brains are working really hard, as you can imagine.
If you watch a child figuring out their way in the world, that’s exactly what’s going on. Their brain is working a mile a minute. That tends to slow down a little bit with age, socialization, responsibilities of being adults. We positioned Thinkie not as a medical device or as a treatment, but as something preventative. Prophylactically, you use Thinkie to improve your cognitive state in a normal brain. For people with MCI or mild cognitive impairment, we have seen improvements with them, but we’re trying to stay clear of FDA strictures. We want to position this as a health and wellness general device, as opposed to something that’s a medical device.
As you can probably tell, going through the history, we’re a science-based company. We’re only going to stand behind something if we have the data that shows it will stand up to scrutiny. We don’t have enough data for people with MCI or entering into Alzheimer’s to be able to confidently say that it will help. We may go in that direction as we land funding from external investors and break off from our parent company, but that remains to be seen at this point. I don’t want people to think that this is something that’s going to cure or fix an MCI, but we know that it can help. It’s just not a position that we’re taking publicly.
That makes sense. There might be more data in the future that would lead towards that.
Possibly.
As a preventative measure, though, could you imagine a world where if everyone used a system like Thinkie from the time they’re 40 on, how might that change the aging curve, or how might that change our future?
That’s an interesting question. If you think about it, the older I get, the more I realize I need to take care of my body because it tells me. We probably feel that to some degree, where that might ache or not getting quite enough sleep, or slipping on something wrong. Your body will start to tell you, and the brain will start to tell you as well, but it works in different ways.
I think people understand that they need to take care of their physical body and their physique. Because we’re living longer, we want to live better. We don’t want to have our bodies fall apart and have debilitating issues as we get older. There’s a little bit less awareness of the brain, but people understand very quickly at the same time that intuitively, “I need to take care of the whole body. The mind, as well as my body. I need to take care of my entire self.”
I’m sure, with your audience, there are people who are in prime physical shape well into their golden years. That happens, it’s just whether it’s something that they want to dedicate themselves to becoming that particular physical specimen. You could do the same thing with Thinkie to a certain extent. You could have a lot of people who are in great shape physically, who are in great shape cognitively, and could potentially continue their work history. They could continue their occupation well past the age of retirement, or they may be volunteering, advising, or doing all of the things that people who were at or around retirement age start to consider.
Having that cognitive acuity to be able to respond, and to keep a position of leadership, with all of the history that you have, with all of the experience that you have, being an older adult. It’s fascinating to think about where the world could end up if we all took care of our brains better, and we all mature in age in a way that our cognition kept up with our longevity.
Brain Health’s Future: AI, Wearables, And Cognitive Acuity For Longevity
That’s amazing. You mentioned that not that long ago, 10 or 15 years ago, it was the size of a table and cost $200,000. Now, it’s tiny and fits in your pocket, and you can wear it on your forehead. We’re in this convergence of technology with AI and all these amazing developments that are happening. Where do you see brain health going over the next 5 to 10 years, especially as it continues to intersect with AI, wearables, and things like Thinkie?
That’s a good question. To be honest, I’m so focused on running the business that we have right now that I hesitate to forecast where we’ll be. We’ve all observed what’s happening in two years with AI. It’s striking and remarkable where things are different. If we can get to 5,000 or 10,000 monthly active users with Thinkie, think about the health data that we would have there that we could then use for experimentation, for research, or for pharmaceutical testing. Some interesting use cases could come out of that.
Our goal right now is we’re focused on improving people’s cognition, but a way that we can do that once we’ve hit critical mass in the market is that we could then take a look at the data. We would have blood flow data, brain training data, and cognitive performance data for a broad swath of the country. We’re focused on selling in the US and Canada right now. We’d have a broad swath of how North Americans are living cognitively and how they are or are not improving their cognition as they age. I think it would be fascinating to put together an AI tool that would go in there, and not just ask our questions, but tell us what the data says, describe what they’re seeing in the data, and what conclusions we can arrive at, or what insights that reveal.
It would be fascinating to know that. I think that there are a lot of people who are moving in that direction as well, that we would potentially align with further down the line once we’ve got that usage data. I hesitate to prognosticate it at this point because two years ago, AI was avant-garde and a new thing. Everybody was using it, but it was underwhelming in a lot of ways. Now, it’s part of my daily routine. My kids are in high school, and it’s part of their daily routine as well. They ask questions.
You’ll notice that we have stopped focusing as much on SEO in our marketing, and we’re looking for generative optimizations. People go to a Google search, and they get that generative response. They essentially click on nothing, and they get their answer. They’ve gotten the answer that they’re looking for. They don’t necessarily need to comb through our website. They don’t need to comb through our research. They can get those answers right away.
If you're going to actually try and improve your physique, you need to work hard; Thinkie helps your brain work hard. Share on X
That’s one of the things that, in marketing, I see changing for the better. We’re going to get answers faster and very quickly lead ourselves to a conclusion that we need to, so that we can move on with our days. I hesitate to go too far into where AI would take us with this because things have changed so much in the last two years. I’m glad I’m here to see it right now.
It’s exciting times. I’ve heard before that our brains are creating new neurons every day. Do you know how many new neurons are developed in our brain each day, or around about?
You’re talking to the marketing guy.
Okay. Let me ask you this, then. If we don’t stimulate our brain enough, if we’re not exercising in the way that a device like Thinkie allows us to exercise our brain, those neurons just move on. We have to do “heavy lifting” with our brain to get those neurons to develop into and lock into our brain, and strengthen it. Using a system like Thinkie, and you mentioned doing it every other day, I’m assuming it’s like other exercises that we do. It’s not like if you did this for four hours a day, you are going to speed it up too much. You have to do it a little bit at a time, and it’s incremental. There’s not necessarily a benefit for doing this more than every other day for 10 or 15 minutes.
That’s a good point. Each of us gets exhausted when we exercise too much. You get to a point of diminishing returns. The interesting thing about the brain is that there’s so much plasticity. You’re right, the neural connections do degrade with time, but they don’t necessarily disappear. They can just get wired around, and they can get reactivated if you challenge and stimulate your brain.
It’s much in the same way that when you’re over 50 or 60, you can still put on muscle, and you can still run a marathon. You just need to train a little bit differently than you would if you’re 25. Those neural connections are still accessible. You just have to find a way to activate them. Dr. Kawashima’s research shows that universally. We do a lot of things in our brain with our brain training games to stimulate our attention switching, prediction, and concentration.
Two things are pretty much universal for anybody in any culture in any part of the world that are going to stimulate the brain by doing simple math exercises very quickly. That’s going to stimulate your brain. That’s part of our brain age test: two plus four, six times five, zero minus one. You do them as quickly as you can, and that stimulates your brain. It doesn’t have to be heavy lifting. It feels tiring because you’re doing it quickly. The element is doing those simple exercises quickly for about 60 seconds, and then switching over to something a little bit more of an attention-switching exercise.
There’s a lot more going on when you’re reading out loud in part of your brain where reading silently does not. When you’re reading silently, you’re translating the words into ideas in your head, but when you’re speaking words aloud, you have to listen to yourself, gauge your audience’s reaction, and predict what’s going on in the sentence so that you can get the right inflection and tone of voice. There’s a lot more going on when you read aloud.
Those two exercises we find are very beneficial to just about everybody. You don’t have to do them for terribly long. Read aloud for ten minutes, and you’re probably done for the day with your cognitive exercise regimen. When it comes to doing simple math calculations, you do that for about 60 seconds at a time over a course of 10 minutes again. You’ve exercised your brain enough to reactivate that neural circuitry, to improve the connections that already exist, and to speed up the connections so that you’ll see the benefits and the results in a short amount of time.
That makes a lot of sense. That’s amazing. It’s not like you have to do this for hours and hours a day.
Thankfully, not.
Busting Brain Myths: Activating Cognition And Simple Math’s Power
There are probably a lot of myths out there about brain health and neural plasticity. For a long time, people believed that this is just what happens, and your brain is your brain. There’s a lot of data that suggests that’s completely not true. What are one or two myths about brain health that drive you nuts, or that you wish everybody knew were myths?
You mentioned one of them. It’s the fact that you’re your brain is the way it is, and that you’re going to lose cells. You’re going to lose connections, and there’s nothing that can be done about it. That’s quite the contrary, which is encouraging if you think about it. It’s much like you can see people who improve their physique at an older age as well, and it takes a fair amount of work. Doing that for the brain doesn’t take nearly as much work as people might think.
The other misconception that’s out there is that you have to run integral calculations. You have to do calculus in your head and work on very complex processes. That’s not the case. That actually engages much less of your brain. When you and I met in San Diego, they showed you the MRI of different brains under different activities, and doing heavy calculations doesn’t have a whole lot of brain activity, but doing easy calculations quickly, you could see that a lot of the brain was activated, particularly the prefrontal cortex.
Same thing with listening to classical music. People think that’s a great way to stimulate your brain. It’s a passive activity. You want to do something active, reading aloud, playing classical music, reading it from the sheet music, and then translating that into motion in an instrument is a very different exercise entirely. People think that there’s an element of passivity and an element of perhaps hopelessness. Those are the two things that we try to work against and make sure that people understand.
You can take the initiative, you can do something about this, you have to do something active. It’s not something where you’re going to sit back and have it happen for you, but it doesn’t take a whole lot of work, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of time. What’s beautiful about Thinkie is that it can work into the system that you already have. If you have something you already like to do, then you can just adopt Thinkie, tailor it into that process, and there you are.
A lot of people that I know and work with here, we do Wordle together at lunch or whatever. It’d be interesting to put the Thinkie sensor on and see what’s happening. If you do this every day, it’s probably not stimulating you as much as you think. You need to start doing something a little more challenging or quicker.
The other thing that you can do is to always add the element of speed. Try and go much more quickly. At whatever exercise you’re doing, you’ll find that you engage much more of your prefrontal cortex than before if that neuroplasticity starts to set in and you start to get habituated better at something.
What's beautiful about Thinkie is it can integrate into your existing routines. If you have something you already enjoy, you can simply adopt it with Thinkie. Share on X
Cost And Accessibility: How To Get Started With Thinkie
That’s amazing. Maybe tell us and break it down a little bit. You buy the sensor. That’s $250, and then you pay for a monthly fee on the app.
Yep. It’s pretty typical. $250 one time. You can buy that for the whole household. Everybody living under your roof can use the sensor. Probably, you’re not going to be competing using it at the same time. It’s not going to be an issue there. You don’t need to have multiple sensors for a household. You can have one, and then each person is going to want to have their own account that keeps track of their brain age and their cognitive level over time. It will show you graphically how your brain age has improved and how your cognition has improved through the use of Thinkie. That’s $9 a month, or $99 per year.
If you had a household of four, you could buy the sensor once. Each of you would have your own account, and you would use that on a regular basis. We’re in the process of putting together a mindfulness app. It’s part of the app, where you would wear the sensor in the center of your forehead and access what’s called the Default Mode Network, which is what is accessed when your mind is active, but you’re not interacting with the world.
People call it a reverie. Sometimes they call it the state of flow. It’s a way to calm your mind in a certain way by not interacting with the world. It’s good for consolidating memories as part of what happens during the sleep process as well. Accessing that can make you feel more mindful, certainly, and yet calm at the same time. There’s a different aspect that we’re going to introduce with Thinkie. That’s probably going to have its own access. Right now, you can download the Thinkie app for free, and you can use up to four different games, and you can take your brain age. It doesn’t cost you anything, and then you can decide if you want to get a sensor along with that. We’ll ship one out to you the next day.
In the future, you’re mentioning some new advancements are coming, like mindfulness. You can wear it as you’re meditating or praying or things like that, or if you’re in a flow state. How are you getting the feedback if you’re meditating? How do you get the feedback then if you’re eyes are closed?
Our brain meter function is the one that you use when you’re doing something that’s not on the app. You turn that on and you try to keep your brain activity low, so that the blood flow is lower, so that you can access the Default Mode Network. I’m the marketing guy, not a neuroscientist by any stretch of the imagination. I’m not exactly certain how that function works. The idea is you want to go the other direction and bring down your brain activity so that you can access what’s called the Default Mode Network, and get into that state of reverie and mindfulness of meditation. Your mind is still active, but at a much lower state, and the important thing is you’re not interacting with the world around you.
You can then look at that data after the fact, too.
Yes, exactly. The brain meter will show you exactly what your current level was, and then you can take notes. You can leave notes for yourself or even an annotation that says, “This is what I was doing during that. I was doing yoga, or I was focusing on my breath, or whatever route you want to go to attain a mindful state,
Is there anything else upcoming features or advancements on the horizon?
We still both go to senior living communities, as well as individual consumers. We’ve found that in the senior living world, the people who are the health and wellness directors, the people who are lifestyle directors, want to incorporate Thinkie into their weekly list of events. One of them has more access to the group data so that they can see how their particular group of Thinkie users is performing. One of the interesting things that we found was that we’ve identified there was a consumer opportunity to sell directly to individuals, like you and me, and not just senior living.
The senior living communities were using Thinkie as part of their marketing to get new residents. They were saying, “Look at us. We’re technologically advanced. We’ve got this new tool that’s going to help improve your memory, improve your cognition.” We were mystified by the fact that it might even happen; we missed it. It turned out that the adult children of those parents or of those aged people who were essentially assessing the readiness of a facility or a community for their parents, wanted Thinkie as well.
We’re going to build more data accessibility and more recording into it, so that you can see how you stack up against other people that you may know, and other people that you may not know. You can see what the trends look like over time and make this more automatic. Right now, you have to go and say, “I want this particular report.” We’re going to send those to you automatically. You can tell us what you’re interested in. You can say, “I want to focus on my concentration. Guide me towards more concentration-oriented activities, and then tell me, periodically, how my concentration has improved.”
That would be more of a bespoke process for an individual user. We hope that will improve the stickiness of the product, which is already pretty good. It will also give people a better sense of how they’re investment in something like Thinkie, and how the investment of their time, is paying off and giving them a dividend.
I’m curious about your own personal use, too, Nick. You’re 52. How often do you use the Thinkie system personally and with your family? You mentioned that your family uses it sometimes, too. What have you noticed? Just kind of a testimonial here. What has your own personal experience been?
My kids are in high school, so they’re brains are still very neuroplastic. They’ll wear it around while they’re doing the dishes or watching TV. It’s paying down at the max. That doesn’t happen for me. I was taken aback that my brain age was 56 when I first took the test, and I was not happy with that number. I’ve now got down to 48, which is good as far as I’m concerned. I don’t get to use Thinkie as often as I would like to because we’re trying to land funding for our business. I do have Thinkie moments or Thinkie time carved out at the end of the day, where I will sit down.
I’m a musician. I will play my guitar and sing, wear Thinkie at the same time, and see how active my brain is. It is a great way. I’m also learning to sight-read. Unfortunately, a lot of guitarists don’t know how to read music, and I’m one of them. I’m learning how to do that. I can see that I get a lot of mental activity when I try and do that. It’s actually tiring by the end of it.
I’ve been working with Thinkie for about a year. I’ve managed to bring my brain age down by almost a decade at that time. I’m very pleased with where I am at this point. I’ve gotten them for my parents. My parents used them almost religiously. They love it, and they will text me, “My brain age is down by five years from where it was this time last year. It’s interesting to see, and I like the fact that they can take the initiative to take charge of their own cognitive health. It’s not something that I have to impose upon them or ask them to do. They already know that it’s something that they want, so they can keep up with their grandkids.
In all, it has been a gratifying experience. It’s been great to see the improvements that I’ve gotten. What’s also good is if I go too long without using it, it’ll send me a reminder in the app saying, “You’re overdue. You need to take this test.” Set aside some time, and we’re going to add it to your calendar so that you can get the reminder. It’s nice in that way.
You’ve been a beneficiary of this, and you’ve seen significant change.
Eat your own dog food, as they say.
Do you feel on a day-to-day basis that you are able to concentrate a little more, or have more mental clarity or focus? Did you notice that difference significantly?
The thing I noticed the most is the memory. I have fewer moments where I walk into a room and I’m like, “What am I doing here? What was the purpose?” or I have a much better sense of where the car keys are, remember birthdays and anniversaries, no problem, those sorts of things. I do notice it, and it’s made a material difference in my life because having a better memory allows me to switch attention between one thing and another, and be able to come back and not have to start over where I left off, which I found was the case a year and a half ago before I started using it. If I got distracted, I had to recontextualize when I switched my attention back to what I was doing originally. Now, that’s not so much. It’s been helpful in that regard. I feel like I get more done in less time, and honestly, who doesn’t want that?
That sounds great to me. Do you have any other go-to mental clarity practices or longevity practices that you’re personally implementing in your life besides Thinkie?
Nick’s Personal Journey: Yoga, Memory Improvement, And Mental Clarity
Yeah. For the last twenty-odd years, I’ve done yoga on a regular basis, and it helps. I tend to have stiff muscles. I’ll wear Thinkie while I’m doing it, and sometimes my mind will wander more than it ought to. I don’t get the cognitive benefit when I’m exercising. I find myself going back to the app to train, but that’s one of the things that has helped both in terms of flexibility and feeling better physically, but also having a better sense of I can handle it whenever a crisis erupts. I don’t have as quick a response. It’s easier to put things in perspective and take things as they come. That, combined with the cognitive training, has been good for my mental well-being.
Any favorite book, podcast episode, or anything on cognitive health or neuroplasticity? What’s your go-to that you tell people, “You’ve got to read this or learn about this?”
I have to remember his name exactly. I can find it for you, but he is a scientist who talks to a wide variety of scientists. Sean Carroll, that’s his name. It’s called Mindscape. It’s not cognitive. He does touch on cognitive health with some of his guests, but he talks about society, culture, and philosophy, all within the context of science. That’s important because we’re seeing that there’s more skepticism about science these days.
People are not as quick to lend credence to science, and it’s important. I stress this with my kids, and I try to do this myself. What we’re looking for is answers. We’re not looking for a position to take. We want to have answers about the way the world works, so we have a better understanding of it, and science is the way to get there. I will listen to that podcast with Thinkie on, depending on the episodes, I get varying results, but usually, it’s pretty heavy stuff. I would recommend that as a way to broaden your horizons, and give you a lot more to think about that you might not otherwise have encountered.
That’s fine. I didn’t think about it like, “Let me listen to this podcast or this Audible book and put Thinkie on at the same time,” or you could even be reading a challenging book.
It has to be challenging. We talked about that. We don’t have to go quickly. What I’ll do is I’ll put it on 1.5x speed.
I was going to say, you put it on 2x speed, and then see how your brain goes.
Two is a little too much. It gets a little garbled for me, but 1.5x speed, and then I’ll do that while I’m exercising on an exercise bike, and I’ll see that my mind is tuning in to that, listening, decoding, and deciphering what’s being said, and understanding. It’s not like listening to something that’s about pop news or pop culture. It’s talking about science. It’s stimulating. As a matter of fact, I can’t listen to an entire episode at 1.5x speed because it gets to be too much to process, but that’s a good way to do something unconventional, and yet it works for my brain.
Nick, this has been amazing. To think that we could decrease our brain age by a decade just by playing some brain games and wearing this device for ten minutes a day, every other day, is pretty amazing. How can people find this? They can download the app for free on the App Store. Give us a little breakdown, website, and things like that. Where do we get this?
Our website is ThinkieSystem.com. You’ll find all the research that we’ve done there. You’ll find the chronology of the development of both the hardware and the software, and everything that we’ve done to get this to a point where you can put it in your pocket and use it for a few minutes a day to improve your cognition. You can also buy it from Amazon.com, the App Store, and Google Play, as you mentioned. We exist for both.
We have iterations for both iOS and Android, so you can get it there and get started, and it’s free. You just sign in. The nice thing is that we used to have to log in and create an account. We now allow you to use your App Store login to create an account for yourself. It’s a seamless process. You don’t have to remember passwords or anything like that, and go to a separate site. You can just download, log in through your social accounts, and then you’re off to the races.
Fantastic. You’ve made it easy. I’m definitely going to download the app, get my brain age, and see how I do, and then get going with my own device here soon. Thank you for the amazing work you’re doing. I know it’s going to make a significant difference in a lot of people’s lives. I hope that our audience will take advantage of this opportunity as well, download the app, and get going today.
Very good. Thank you very much.
Thank you so much for joining us. We’ll be in touch here soon.
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What a fascinating conversation. I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. I learned so much from Nick in my conversation with him. It’s amazing to think that we need to continually train our brains. It does make sense that if we do the same things over and over again, we’re not putting any strain on our brain, and therefore, we’re not strengthening it. Using a system like Thinkie, we can easily train our brains, and I love that it’s only ten minutes at a time. It doesn’t take a long time. If we did this every other day, 3 or 4 days a week, for 10 to 15 minutes, over the course of a year, we could increase or decrease our brain age by up to ten years. There’s a lot of science and data to back that up.
I’m excited about this. I’m going to download the app, get my brain age, and then purchase my Thinkie sensor. It’s only $250. Hopefully, that’s accessible for most people. I think that this can make a big difference. I’m excited to introduce this to all of you, to all of our listeners, and to our community here at Shell Point. I think this can be a game changer in a lot of ways. I hope that you’ll take advantage of it, and that you enjoyed this episode, learn something, and got something out of it. Until next time, I’m your host, Zach Gurick. Thanks for joining us here on Fully Alive, where we’re unlocking the secrets to your healthier, happier, and longer life. See you soon.
