Parents often ask us, will our SMART brain training course be of benefit to gifted children. Our reply is a resounding Yes, as SMART brain training will raise the general intelligence of an above average or even a genius child. This is because there is no limit to how relationally skilled anyone can become. Our brain training course allows infinite improvement because users are encouraged to regularly revise stages of training that they have already mastered, and this helps them become more accurate and faster in solving problems. Even after completion they can continue to train at their own convenience. Our child users typically attain at least a typical adult level of logical reasoning and ability following their training.

The SMART brain training makes users expert in logical reasoning to a level that is well beyond that of the average adult. Your current IQ can always be higher and SMART is useful no matter what your starting intelligence level. This is because there is no limit to how relationally skilled a user can become. Our brain training course allows infinite improvement because users are encouraged to regularly revise stages of training that they have already mastered, so they not only become more accurate in their answers to our questions, but also become faster in solving problems. Even after completion, users can continue to train at their own convenience.

At the beginning of your SMART brain training course we ask every customer to take what we call a Relational Abilities Test. This test has been devised in laboratory research to give us a measure of your intelligence. This test takes around 20 minutes to complete. We know from extensive research and study groups that scores on this test correlate well with tests of general intelligence for children, adults and the elderly. (Full IQ tests cannot be administered online for legal and ethical reasons, as well as the fact that their accuracy would be difficult to determine). When SMART brain training is completed after several weeks (approximately 10-12 weeks) we again assess our customers' Relational Abilities in order to calculate their intellectual improvement. Our research suggests that for every 2% improvement in relational abilities score, you can expect to see around a 1 point increase in general intelligence as measured by a standard intelligence test (only available from a qualified psychologist). With this information we can help you work out how much your IQ has risen as a result of SMART training. Apart from the improvement in relational ability or IQ, by completing the SMART brain training course your brain will have benefited enormously from all of the learning and brain practice that you have put in to your SMART training. The increase in your relational skills will help you in every aspect of your learning and problem soling.

The SMART Brain Training course from RaiseYourIQ is developed and run by education leaders and published psychologists. The founders of RaiseYourIQ are Dr. Bryan Roche and Dr. Sarah Cassidy who have used scientific evidence gathered from over 10 years university research to create this online brain training platform. Numerous published studies have proven that the better your relational skills, the higher your IQ will be. Several other published studies have shown how we can best teach relational skills. Published experiments have also shown that relational skills training like SMART brain training are followed by very significant increases in IQ (at least 10 points) that last for several years. These sorts of IQ rises are enough for a slow learner to be re-classified as normal, or for a normal individual to be reclassified as above normal. Please read our Scientific Evidence for more information on SMART Brain Training and a research publication list.

SMART STANDS FOR;
- Strengthening
- Mental Abilities with
- Relational Training
SMART Brain Training has been developed by RaiseYourIQ from over 10 years education and training research. The founders of RaiseYourIQ; Dr. Bryan Roche and Dr. Sarah Cassidy are education leaders, psychologists and published authors in the field of "Relational Frame Theory". They continue their work and research in this field today. We have not borrowed the SMART science from the experts. We ARE the experts!

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To start an individual Free Trial click Brain Training Free Trial

SMART brain training helps you to become expert in some critical cognitive skills, called Relational Skills. These skills underlie just about everything you do in school, at work and in normal day-to-day decision making and problem-solving.

SMART teaches you how to learn.

The SMART brain training course is like any other education or training course, it involves just 30 minutes of effort a few times per week with the end result of improving a range of intellectual skills that underlie just about everything you do in school, work and in everyday life.
We are the only Brain Training company offering online relational skills training based on the tried and tested methods of applied behavior analysis (ABA). These technologies have developed over decades in a research tradition started by the now legendary psychologist B.F Skinner. Skinner was not a brain scientist. He was an expert in the science of learning and teaching. Skinner’s ideas eventually led to the development of supremely successful treatments for a whole range of educational and intellectual deficits including autism spectrum disorders, and his approach taught us how to help individuals reach and surpass their intellectual potential. This makes SMART brain training suitable for children,adults and anyone seeking to reach their potential.

RaiseYourIQ is lead by its co-founders; Dr Bryan Roche and Dr. Sarah Cassidy. Both are psychologists, education leaders and published authors in the field of "Relational Frame Theory".
To find out more about our company please click here RaiseYourIQ
.To find out more about the science behind the SMART brain training course click here Brain Training Science

SMART brain training is much more than a brain training app, it is a complete brain training course delivered in a game format. The user can conduct the course online on most computer devices. SMART brain training is a game based learning solution to improve intelligence. It has been developed by published authors and educational psychologists following over 10 years scientific research into IQ at NUIM University. Each brain training course is divided into modules, each module has a series of intellectual games which get progressively harder as the brain fitness levels improve. Every brain training course comes with a free trial and IQ assessment test with no hidden catches.

The SMART IQ test is free. It is a scientifically valid IQ test developed by psychologists. The basic IQ test consists of 12 random statements to be answered with a report at the end. The advanced IQ test consists of 55 random statements and is a far more accurate report on a persons IQ. On the IQ test the user answers the questions by clicking on the words Yes or No on the screen. At the end of the test you will receive a report containing the correct number of answers and a fluid score. The fluid score is important as it uses an algorithm to determine your brains processing speed. As you progress through the 70 stages on SMART brain training, you can take re-assessments to measure IQ gains.

Increase IQ, fluid intelligence and cognitive functions with a series of games that trains the brain to improve a range of intellectual skills. The IQ games or brain training is a course covering over 70 stages divided into modules. Each module works a different cognitive function and gets gradually more difficult as the user progresses. The IQ games include "N-Back Training" "Brain Speed" "Brain Agility" and "Brain Memory. These four brain training IQ games together with the 70 stage SMART Brain Training from RaiseYourIQ is the most comprehensive and scientifically proven method to raise IQ by anywhere from 10 to 20 points.

Mental health well being and mindfulness can be improved by brain training. Brain training exercises will enhance the mind in cognitive areas of learning skills,problem solving skills, working memory and fluid intelligence. Brain training contributes to mental well being as it helps the user to reach his or her full intellectual ability, helps people reach their full potential by making learning easier, trains the brain to deal with data,information and logic. A healthy, active brain brings a sense of well being and as brain training is scientifically proven to raise a child or adults IQ, coping and understand life's, school or business challenges becomes easier.

SMART brain training software from RaiseYourIQ is based on established principles of learning that have been proven to underlie intellectual development across a wide range of areas (reading, problem solving, reasoning, and so on). The skills that have been identified as underlying most intellectual abilities, are called “relational skills” and our founders (Doctor Bryan Roche and Doctor Sarah Cassidy) have played a key role identifying how “relational skills training” impacts a persons intellectual ability. We then devised the SMART brain training course to teach people these crucial learning skills. Dozens of published studies from several independent laboratories have honed in on the development of relational skills as they key to intellectual development. RaiseYourIQ have also published two experiments which show that IQ can be increased by a large amount using our method – something no other brain training company has done.

The FAST (Function Acquisition Speed Test) is a newly developed training and testing programme designed to weaken the effect of mental associations where they are emotionally problematic. It has been examined in several peer reviewed scientific studies published by a team of researchers based at Maynooth University. It has emerged from Relational Frame Theory (RFT) and aligns with the approach of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) in helping you to “deliteralize” or “defuse” the meanings of threatening or painful words, so that you can respond in more creative ways to painful thoughts and feelings. The various games target various psychological issues, such as anxiety, food issues, self-esteem issues and so on.  The user chose the games they feel are most suitable for them and they play regularly, several times per week or every day, until they reach the target flexibility score.

The FAST (function acquisition speed test) was developed to assess and alter the degree to which people show psychological inflexibility around certain issues.  Early research in the field of “stimulus equivalence” found that people find it difficult to learn a task that involves even indirectly matching words or images that do not go together for that individual.  For example, for most people the words Murder and Good do not go together easily, but the words MURDER and BAD do.  A task that requires a user to match, under time pressure, the words MURDER to BAD rather than to the word GOOD, will show the user making lots of mistakes and learning the task more slowly.

In one study by Rhonda Merwin and Kelly Wilson published in 2005, it was found that people who score high in measures of distress and a negative sense of self make significantly more errors in a simple learning task that required them to match self-referential terms, such as the word “me” with positive evaluation words, such as “perfect”.  In contrast, people found it easier to learn the task that involved matching self-referential terms with negative terms such as “unworthy”.  Several other studies found the same type of effect in the context of racial prejudice, sexism, and other aspects of self-esteem and a significant number of these studies were run and published by members of the RaiseYourIQ team and led to the development of the FAST tool.

This early research used a method called the “stimulus equivalence” method, and it was cumbersome for users, took too much time, and did not offer the possibility of of being used realistically as a training tool to loosen the rigidity people show towards sensitive issues.  The FAST was developed as an easy to use method for this purpose.

Merwin and Wilson had suggested in 2005 that this effect whereby people find it hard to learn tasks that contradict their personal histories (e.g., a racist individual will find it hard to learn new associations between labels for particular ethics groups and positive terms), had important therapy implications.  As one of the key founding Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT; Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 1999) researchers, Kelly Wilson argued that we could use this effect to diagnose and perhaps treat this resistance to learning shown by people who hold rigid verbal associations.  However, at the time no such easy to use treatment tool existed to target this process and aid with verbal and psychological flexibility around sensitive issues.

The particular ACT technique that the FAST method applies, is called “cognitive delusion”.  The FAST does in a digital format, what Cognitive Defusion exercises aim to do in the therapy session.  That is, they give the client the chance to practice exposing themselves to various other ways of seeing concepts and issues that are causing them trouble.  For instance, for a drug addict, there may be trigger words that create struggle with compulsion.  For someone struggling with anxiety, there may be words that trigger intense fear or other rigid reactions.  For a person with depression there may be a seemingly unbreakable link between thoughts and words related to the self and negative evaluative terms, a link which exacerbates the problem in a vicious circle.

Cognitive Defusion exercises,  and the FAST, do not attempt to undermine or change these problematic verbal or “mental” associations, but aim to expand and add to them, loosen them, and make them more sensitive to context.  As a simple example, for a spider phobic, we do not need to try to reframe all spiders as perfectly safe in an obviously contradictory way.  Instead we can teach the client that spiders are sometimes dangerous and sometimes safe.  This approach leaves the often rational aspect of the struggle in place (i.e., it is true that some spiders are deadly), but it softens the responses of the client by also allowing alternative reactions on some occasions (e.g., the response becomes more complex and diverse). 

The FAST involves teaching users to make their stereotypical associations in one part of the training / game (e.g., spiders – terrible), but requires them to break those associations and make incompatible ones in another part of the task (e.g., Spiders-happy).  This process of affirming and disconfirming the associations in questions across short blocks of task learning, makes the associations in question less rigid but does not eliminate or replace them.

There are many published studies showing the clinical benefits of cognitive defusion exercises, and the FAST is a new digital format for the delivery of such exercises.

Psychological flexibility, or emotional flexibility, is a broad concept referring to the degree to which an individual routinely reacts to feelings, thoughts and things in their environment  in ways that are sensitive to the situation, rather than based on rigid inflexible habits.  Examples might be the anger with which a person always responds whenever they are criticized, or the drinking that a person engages in whenever they think of alcohol, or the self-harm a person engages in whenever they feel sad. These responses do not need to be so rigid.  They can be made flexible so that the situations in which the problematic response occurs (e.g., drinking), happens only in a specific variety of those circumstances (e.g., appropriate social ones).  Another way of putting this, is that we can learn to broaden our response options in all situations.

Think of a spider phobic, for example.  For such an individual, the word “Spider” may provide a reliable  response of thinking of pain, venom, disgust and so on.  The same thoughts and emotional responses occur on every occasion with little or no variability.  This is what defines the response as inflexible.  However, imagine that this individual learns in a safe calm environment to associate additional concepts with Spiders.  These will not replace the ideas they already have, but add to them. For example, we might teach the individual to categorise spiders into four types, based on geographical region, or based on how venomous they are.  Now, after such training, the individual is presented with a picture of a spider and simply asked what they are thinking and what they feel.  They will almost certainly feel the same old feelings and have the same old thoughts again.  But they may ALSO have thoughts such as “this spiders looks South American” or “this one is not venomous”, and so on.  This broadening of response richness and variability reduces the dominance of the singular rigid and problematic former response so that it only one of many response possibilities.  The person is growing.  They are becoming more emotionally and psychologically flexible around the issue of spiders.    The response to spiders has become less rigid and more flexible without in any way challenging, contradicting or denying the real fear the individual has of spiders. Now imagine this same process occurring with compulsions to abuse drugs, or sexually offend or over eat or catastrophize feelings of fear.

This process employed by the FAST is built upon a technique known as Cognitive Defusion in the Acceptance and  Commitment Therapy literature (see Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 1999 and several texts by Steven C. Hayes since). The FAST does in a digital format, what Cognitive Defusion exercises aim to do in the therapy session.  That is, they give the client the chance to practice exposing themselves to various other ways of seeing concepts and issues that are causing them trouble.  For instance, for a drug addict, there may be trigger words that create struggle with compulsion.  For someone struggling with anxiety, there may be words that trigger intense fear or other rigid reactions.  For a person with depression there may be a seemingly unbreakable link between thoughts and words related to the self and negative evaluative terms, a link which exacerbates the problem in a vicious circle.

Cognitive Defusion exercises,  and the FAST, do not attempt to undermine or change these problematic verbal or “mental” associations, but aim to expand and add to them, loosen them, and make them more sensitive to context.  As a simple example, for a spider phobic, we do not need to try to reframe all spiders as perfectly safe in an obviously contradictory way.  Instead we can teach the client that spiders are sometimes dangerous and sometimes safe.  This approach leaves the often rational aspect of the struggle in place (i.e., it is true that some spiders are deadly), but it softens the responses of the client by also allowing alternative reactions on some occasions (e.g., the response becomes more complex and diverse). 

FAST training is designed to simply broaden the mind and open the heart in terms of enhancing our cognitive and emotional openness to events in the world around us and particularly around issues we struggle with.    For example, for a white individual with racists views of black people, they may find that after completing our FAST racial sensitivity training game (by reaching the target flexibility score), that they have more complex reactions to black individuals and a wider range of feelings and thoughts come to mind upon seeing or meeting one.  At the same time they may notice a reduction in the dominance of simple assumptions or judgements, although these will not be eliminated.  In other words, enhanced psychological flexibility means that our responses are more thoughtful, calmer, more considered and less stereotypes, rigid and inflexible than they previously were.   This in essence means that we are interacting with the world more as it is, more as we find it, and not as we have already decided it will be.  We  are more open, more engaged and more ready to learn about the realities round us, rather than remaining shielded from the way things really are by rigid mental associations.

It is a good idea to train almost every day in short sessions of 10 minutes or so.  This should be kept up for several weeks at least, even if you have reached the target score set for that game.  It is also a good idea to give games a break after completion and return to them a week or two later indefinitely, for a short refresher.

SMART KidStarter is designed to bridge the gap between early language development (age 4+) and the ability to undertake regular SMART training, or perform on a par with peers in term of language proficiency by around age 7 or 8. It prepares younger users for SMART training by accelerating the development of basic relational skills (scientists call this non-arbitrary relational responding) that underlie complex language. The training is also useful for older children or adults with language delays or other learning challenges, and teaches the basic relational reasoning required for efficient language acquisition.  There are five stages of KidStarter training that will lay the foundation for the 55 main stages of SMART training and on their own also help to accelerate the relational skills of young children – skills thought to underlie general cognitive development.   

As in SMART, each stage requires users to make 16 correct responses to simple YES / NO relational questions in a row before passing the training stage.  A question for example, may involve asking the child whether or not a picture of a child waking up a set of stairs represents the opposite of a picture of a child walking down a set of stairs.  Feedback is presented after every answer provided.  Once 16 in a row of such question types are answered correctly, the user is presented with a short test, on which they must answer all 16 questions correctly without feedback, in order to pass that stage. Stages must be completed in order and are locked until the previous stage is passed.  All stages should be passed before a child attempts the full 55-stage SMART training. 

An assistant will likely be needed for most users who have little or no reading ability at age 4-7.  The assistant will need to read the questions and help with answering, if necessary. Each stage requires users to make 16 correct responses in a row before passing the training stage. They are then presented with a short test, on which they must answer all 16 questions correctly in order to pass that stage. Stages must be completed in order.

Parents, teachers or other assistants may need to prompt answers or explain correct answers to children but it is not advisable that children are ushered through stages by an assistant effectively answering for the user. Remember, it is not just “knowing” or “understanding” the answer that is important.  It is the ability to produce it reliably and quickly that matters most.    A child should ideally be able to pass the test that comes after passing a training stage, without help.

Users of KidStarter should train at least a few times per week – for 15-20 minutes. 

There are five stages of KidStarter training that will lay the foundation for the 55 main stages of SMART training, but on their own also help to accelerate the relational skills of young children – skills thought to underlie general cognitive development. 

SMART for Dyslexia is based on enhancing sequential relational responding skills (proficient use of the relational concepts before and after) in reading and problem solving, as well as honing the visual identification of and attention to letter sequences within words.  This training directly targets the main sources of reading errors made by anyone diagnosed or suspected of having dyslexia or other reading difficulties.

Training consists of some key early SMART training stages and some newly developed stages involving training fluency in the concepts of Before and After.  All tasks within the twenty stages of training have been modified to require extra special attention to letter sequences.  As the complexity of the problem solving tasks increases across twenty stages of training and testing, so too does the complexity of the letter sequence identification within words.  A very large range of consonant and vowel combinations are used in the nonsense words we employ across the many training trials employed. In effect, every possible combination of vowels and consonants, and therefore every possible pronounciation of sounds, is drawn upon in this training.  The key to the training is the focus on fluency in problem solving that requires attention to letter and word sequences in the problems posed on each training and testing trial. 

Users should train often, several times per week, for short sessions of 10-15 minutes.