Method

Most brain-training apps report an invented composite — a “brain score” that goes up when you get better at their minigames. Cortiq takes the opposite approach: simple, repeatable protocols, measured in seconds, compared only against your own history. If your times fall, that's improvement on the task. No percentile, no cohort, no score.

The daily exercises

• Speed Arithmetic — twenty three-term problems (a ± b ± c), solved left to right. Time and misses are the whole result.
• Symbol Mode — thirty two-term problems where the operators are replaced by shapes, and the shape→operator mapping is dealt fresh every run. You decode, then calculate: switching costs and working memory, not memorized arithmetic.

The weekly tests

Once a week, under the same conditions, on the same device:

• Count 1→120 — counting aloud as fast as possible, self-timed. A processing-speed staple used in cognitive screening for decades.
• Word Memory — 30 common words, two minutes to learn, two minutes to recall, in your own language. Recalling a word list from memory, in any order, is among the oldest instruments in memory research.
• Stroop — name the ink color, ignore the word, 30 items after 3 practice rounds. The classic interference test, in use since 1935.

Why self-comparison only

Comparing you to other people requires knowing who you are, your age, your language fluency, your device, your morning coffee. Comparing you to yesterday's you holds all of that constant. It's the cleanest baseline available — and it's the only one that answers the question you actually care about: am I getting faster?