A startup participant in the AgeTech Collaborative™, Thinkie is on a mission to improve the world's cognitive health. Using near-infrared spectroscopy, Thinkie features a wearable sensor that provides real-time neurofeedback of the brain's activity in the prefrontal cortex. Complementing the sensor is an app that assesses brain age, guides the user's brain training regimen and provides adaptive games to ensure users are always challenged.
We spoke with Nick White, one of Thinkie’s co-founders, who talked about neuroplasticity, how effective brain exercise can be counterintuitive, and how Thinkie can help people turn back the clock on their brain age.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Please tell us about Thinkie.
We often say that Thinkie is like a step counter for your brain. Our focus is on the prefrontal cortex, which is all about executive functioning. The prefrontal cortex is similar to the captain on the bridge of a ship — it assimilates all the visual, spatial, linguistic and other various things your brain is doing and helps you interact with the world. Likewise, it’s the part of the brain that responds first when you get feedback from the outside world.
Consequently, the prefrontal cortex becomes an arbiter of whether or not you might develop cognitive decline, dementia, Alzheimer’s or similar conditions. So if you want to help preclude those conditions, then you want to exercise your brain, especially your prefrontal cortex. Thinkie helps people exercise their prefrontal cortex more effectively.
How does Thinkie become that “step counter for the brain”?
Our brains are capable of neuroplasticity, which is essentially the creation or strengthening of pathways through the brain, along with the harvesting of old pathways that are not being used. It’s a regenerative process, and it’s that regeneration that improves your cognition: Creating new patterns of thought keeps things fresh and alive in your brain.
Our brains are automatically neuroplastic up until 25 or 30 years of age. After that, you’re at risk of decline unless you overtly stimulate your brain. The problem is this: How can you tell if a specific activity is going to induce blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, and therefore encourage neuroplasticity? Your brain can’t tell you that in the same way your body gives you an immediate physical response to a good workout — through an elevated heart rate, sweat and heavier breathing, for example.
That’s where Thinkie comes in. We have a patented sensor that uses near-infrared spectroscopy to measure blood flow to your prefrontal cortex in real time. The sensor is passive — it’s not stimulating your brain at all — but it takes very precise blood-flow measurements in sub-second increments.
How do the sensor and app work together?
The sensor trains you to understand how your brain responds to certain activities. For example, if you have a routine where you play speed chess or play an instrument, the sensor will tell you how hard your brain is working during those activities.
The app, which you download to your phone, includes neuroscientist-designed games that specifically stress your short-term memory, your processing speed, your decision-making and other executive functions. We can stress those things, test those things, and help you get the results you’re looking for.
This brain-training can be counterintuitive. People tend to think they should do something complex to stimulate their brain, like listen to classical music or do calculus. But it turns out that type of complexity works in a different part of the brain. To exercise the prefrontal cortex, you want to do simple activities quickly. For example, our app includes a simple arithmetic exercise, which you complete as quickly as you can, take a break, and do it again, all for about a minute at a time. We have another game that challenges your brain by asking you to track the trajectory of an object across the screen, which becomes increasingly more difficult. If you play these quick games 15 minutes a day, every other day, for a total of about an hour a week, you’ll perceive improvements in your cognition.
Just like physical training, consistency is key.
You need to do mental exercises to help stave off things like cognitive decline and dementia, in the same way you exercise your body to stave off physical ailments. The goal is to improve your cognition today and to preserve it over time.
What makes Thinkie stand apart in this regard is that we’re the only company to put the stimulus and feedback together in one place so they can reinforce each other. There are plenty of apps out there that do cognitive training but that don’t measure effectiveness. There are other sensors that will measure blood flow, but they don’t do cognitive training.
Something else to consider is that an exercise that is effective for one person may not work as well for someone else. Effectiveness can also change over time: As we get older, our brains change like our bodies do. That’s why we put the stimulus and feedback together, so they can reinforce each other — having stimulus without feedback leaves you operating in the dark, and there’s no way to have feedback if there isn’t a stimulus.
What was your catalyst for starting Thinkie?
I’m one of three co-founders, and we each have family members who have experienced mental decline. In my case, it was my grandparents and now my parents. One of the other co-founders had a grandfather who was an instrumental part of his development as a young man; he watched his grandfather decline and ultimately die from dementia. So we all have a personal stake in this, but it also represents a huge business opportunity. In five years, one in five people in the U.S. is going to be 65 years old or older, so the need for this is only going to grow.
What kind of obstacles are you facing as you grow to meet that need?
The first is inertia: People generally don’t want to wrestle with cognitive decline because that brings them awfully close to questioning their mortality.
The second is education. People are often content to tell themselves, “I do sudoku a couple of times a week,” or “I do crossword puzzles on Sunday, and that’s enough.” The problem with that is you’re not measuring how effective those activities are. People tend to not understand that having the feedback loop is a critical part of effectively exercising the brain, just as it is for the body. You wouldn’t go to the gym to lift weights without measuring your progress, right? This is especially true for activities that you do a lot, because as you get better at them, your brain adapts, and you lose the benefits of creating new neural pathways — that neuroplasticity that I mentioned earlier.
We understand you’ve run some trials to test the efficacy of Thinkie. How did those turn out?
We’re not an FDA-approved medical device, but the technology that we use is recognized by the FDA as a way of measuring cognition through blood flow. And Thinkie has been validated in scientific trials: We ran three randomized, controlled trials in France, Japan and the U.S. with people aged 40 to 90, and the results prove the efficacy of our device. They also showed that if you use the device for about three months, you can take four years off your brain age. And if you use it consistently for a year, you can take almost a decade off your brain age. Moreover, it showed that getting real-time neurofeedback makes all the difference, because Thinkie lets you know if the exercise is beneficial or if you need to make it more challenging or switch things up.
Your brain and your body more or less age chronologically. Generally, it’s healthy to have a brain that is the same age as your body. But if you don’t care for your brain it can age faster, just like if you don’t care for your body — if you smoke, eat poorly, don’t exercise — it will age faster. The good news is that you can not only arrest your brain age, you can roll it back.
Just as an anecdote, I’m 52 years old. I took our Brain Age Checkup test and the results showed I had a 64-year-old brain. I used Thinkie for six months, took the test again, and my brain age was 46. That’s significant, and I’m happy with that.
What has your experience been as part of the AgeTech Collaborative?
Being part of the AgeTech Collaborative has been a real boon for us. Last year, they brought us to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where we demoed our product for several days. We were also one of three organizations they took to a brain health symposium that was held in New Orleans the day before the Super Bowl. It’s also helped us make great connections with other companies that complement Thinkie, as well as potential investors.
There’s also been an interesting sort-of extension of the AgeTech Collaborative, where various alumni and participants have taken the initiative and started creating our own special interest groups and holding real-world in situ events in various cities. So every month or every quarter, we’ll meet up in places like Atlanta or Seattle or Denver and demo our products.
What’s on the horizon for Thinkie?
There are a plethora of sensors on the market that will measure data from the neck down. Smart watches and other devices make it easy to keep track of your exercise, diet, sleep hygiene and so forth. But there’s nothing out there that measures data from the neck up. That’s the next frontier — and that’s where I see Thinkie going. We’re working with a couple of companies that have those “neck-down” sensors to develop and integrate a software development kit that can give users a whole-body view of cognition as well as the rest of their well-being. That holistic view is conspicuously absent in the marketplace, and we’re working to fill that gap.
You can learn more about Thinkie at their website, and check out our Startup Directory to discover more startup participants in the AgeTech Collaborative.
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