How Smart Are You?

The business of assessing cognition and memory is moving from testing brain-impaired patients to assessing healthy peoples' brains online.

Photograph by: Hulton Archive

The words come in a rapid, random progression on the computer screen: "POET," "BEACH," "ATTENDANT," "JURY," "CAVE" … there are 15 in all. I’m watching them tick by one by one, slightly panicked that I am going to forget them.

The screen goes dark, and I’m now supposed to write down as many of the words as I can quickly recall.

I am annoyed when I manage only five words.

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Pat Turk says not to worry, that this is fairly typical. Turk is director of business development for Cognitive Drug Research, a British firm that uses automated tests to gauge how well we think. He's come to my office in San Francisco to administer a battery of tests to check out my attention, memory and executive function.

I will be compared on this test and several others with people my age and to those who are younger and older. Their results have been averaged on a database of tens of thousands of adults. I’ll also get a “brain-age” score.

I have to admit to certain nervousness. What if a) I turn out to be a moron; or b) my brain-age is older than I am?

Cognitive Drug Research is one a handful of businesses, most of them outside of the U.S., that work with pharmaceutical companies to test how new drugs for everything from nicotine addiction to Alzheimer’s disease affect the mind’s ability to remember things, make decisions, and analyze information.

The results from their tests are recognized “end points” by the Food and Drug Administration to determine if new brain medications work, which means that the drug industry has billions of dollars in potential revenues riding on them.

(For more information, see “The Ultimate Cure,” an article on the neurotechnology industry in the June issue of Condé Nast Portfolio.)

Cognitive tests have been around for a century as examinations taken with paper and pencil. In the 1970s and '80s the tests shifted to computers, Cognitive Drug Research founder Keith Wesnes says. He is a psychologist and neuroscientist who started the company in 1986 as an outgrowth of testing programs he developed for his academic experiments on cognition.

Besides drug trials, cognitive experiments are being run on patients who have had open heart surgery; take cholesterol-lowering drugs; experience what is known as “Chemofog”, a cognitive decline that sometimes accompanies chemotherapy treatments for cancer; and soldiers returning from Iraq with head trauma.

Tests have been run on children eating sugary breakfast cereals versus more healthy breakfasts, and on the cognitive impact of being obese.