Claims Standards
These are the rules we hold ourselves to about what we say. They are published because a rule you can be held to is worth more than a rule you can quietly drop, and because we wrote them while nothing was at stake.
Language we have ruled out
The following is prohibited in anything we publish — including headlines, page descriptions, image alt text, video captions, thumbnails, social posts and anything else a person could screenshot. It is not softened, hedged, or used with a qualifier. It is not used.
Claims that we improve your cognition
- Improve your brain, boost your brainpower, train your brain, get smarter, increase your IQ.
- Guaranteed or proven improvement, "science-backed results", "clinically validated", "scientifically proven".
- Any promise that using this site, our tests, or any product we make changes your cognitive ability.
Health, clinical and diagnostic framing
- Screening, diagnosis, early detection, dementia risk, decline detection, "check your brain health".
- "Your brain is aging", "your brain is getting younger", or any brain-age framing.
- Any implication that a low score indicates a condition, or that a high score rules one out.
Claims about who you are
- IQ, intelligence or genius as a factual description of you.
- "Your true potential", "how smart you are".
Comparisons we cannot support
- Any performance comparison naming a competitor product.
- Percentile, "above average", or "better than X% of people" — unless the instrument being described has reached Rung 2 of the norming ladder. It has not. The ladder, and where we are on it, is published in full.
Claims made by design rather than words
Visual grammar makes claims too. Laboratory imagery, journal-style layouts and certification-style badges imply a validation we do not have, and they are prohibited as firmly as the words are.
How we handle numbers
- Every number we publish is checked against its original source, not against an article describing that source.
- A percentage always carries the count it came from. At small numbers we give the count instead: "3 of 20", not "15%".
- Where a number does not exist yet, we say it does not exist. We do not estimate one, illustrate with one, or approximate.
- We do not state a correlation as if it were a cause, including through the verbs we choose.
Corrections
When we get something wrong, we correct it on the page where it appeared, we date the correction, and we say what was wrong, what it is now, and what changed as a result. We do not delete the record of the error and we do not amend a published page silently.
Corrections to the methodology page are listed on that page. If you think something we have published is wrong, tell us at corrections@brainscoredaily.com.
The test we apply to every sentence
Could a sceptical reader check it? If not, it does not get published.