MindGames by MTMOT
Your leadership brain is still there.
Three pattern-recognition games designed for senior leaders rebuilding cognitive confidence after illness, treatment, or crisis.
You led teams, made high-stakes decisions, and held complexity in your head. Then life intervened — cancer, surgery, burnout, or something else that pulled you away. Somewhere in that process, you stopped trusting your own thinking.
MindGames is not a test. It's not therapy. It's a quiet, structured way to re-engage the skills your brain already has — filtering, connecting, and forging — at a pace you control, without pressure or judgement.
The skill underneath every executive decision.
Pattern recognition is how leaders read a room, spot a weak signal in noisy data, anticipate consequences, and find the right words under pressure. It's not one skill — it's the substrate of strategic thinking.
When illness or crisis disrupts your cognitive rhythm, these pattern-based abilities don't disappear. They go quiet. Research shows they can be reawakened through targeted, repeated practice — especially when that practice is engaging, adaptive, and free from clinical pressure.
MindGames gives your pattern-recognition systems structured opportunities to fire again, across three distinct modes: visual filtering, causal reasoning, and language.
Three modes. Three cognitive dimensions.
Signal & Noise
Read the Room
Multiple streams of information appear on screen simultaneously. Your job: find the one that matters.
This is the executive skill you used every day — filtering signal from noise in meetings, reports, and conversations. Signal & Noise exercises selective attention, inhibitory control, and sustained focus by asking you to ignore convincing distractors and lock onto what counts.
The game adapts in real time. As you improve, the noise gets more similar to the signal — just like real strategic environments where the important and the trivial look almost the same.
“Every time you find the signal, you're reminding your brain: I can still focus. I can still pick out what counts.”
Chain Reaction
The Cascade
A trigger event appears. You build the chain of consequences — selecting what happens next, then next, then next — before time runs out.
This is the “three moves ahead” thinking that defined your career. Chain Reaction exercises causal reasoning, working memory, and processing speed by asking you to simulate cascading consequences under gentle time pressure.
Difficulty adapts across multiple dimensions: chain length, abstraction level, how convincing the wrong options are, and how much time you get per link. The game meets you exactly where you are.
“You're re-engaging the part of you that could see where things were heading — in markets, in teams, in strategy.”
Word Forge
The Craft
Four exercises rotate to keep your verbal brain working from different angles:
Flow (Recall)
Words stream past one at a time at adjustable speed. The passage reappears with a gap — type the word from memory. Trains contextual memory and processing speed.
Flow (Comprehension)
Same streaming display, but now the gap needs a word that fits the meaning, not necessarily the original. Trains reading comprehension and semantic inference.
The Anvil
Scrambled letters plus a clue. Construct the target word. Trains lexical retrieval and orthographic pattern recognition.
The Mould
A source word plus a clue. Change exactly one letter to make a new word. Trains word-level manipulation and semantic association.
Word Forge draws on the same evidence base as crosswords and word puzzles — which have been shown in randomised trials to support memory and thinking in adults with cognitive changes — but adds variety, adaptive difficulty, and leadership-relevant language.
“You're not being tested. You're forging connections between concepts, re-exercising the verbal agility that's central to communication and strategy.”
If you recognise any of this,
you're in the right place.
The Returning Leader
You’re coming back from cancer, stroke, cardiac events, or extended illness. Your brain works — but it feels different. MindGames helps you rebuild confidence in your cognitive sharpness without clinical framing or performance anxiety.
The High-Load Executive
You’re not recovering from anything. You’re just running at maximum cognitive load and you want to stay sharp. MindGames is a daily practice — like going to the gym, but for your brain.
The Kintsugi Thinker
You know that what you’ve been through has changed you. Not broken you — changed you. MindGames honours that. No scores, no rankings, no comparisons. Just your trajectory.
The Curious Mind
You don’t need a reason. You like word games, pattern puzzles, and the feeling of your brain engaging with something just difficult enough to be interesting.
Evidence-aligned, not miracle-claiming.
Here's what we can honestly say:
Targeted cognitive training works
A randomised trial of home-based cognitive training in long-term cancer survivors found significant improvements in cognitive flexibility, processing speed, and verbal fluency, plus better self-reported planning and task monitoring. These gains occurred years after chemotherapy, not just immediately after treatment.
Game-like formats improve engagement
Brain training research consistently shows that when cognitive exercises are engaging and adaptive, people stick with them — and their subjective sense of cognitive capability improves alongside measurable performance. For someone rebuilding after crisis, that restored self-trust may matter as much as any test score.
Word puzzles hold their own
A 78-week randomised trial found that computerised crossword puzzles produced greater cognitive improvement than a suite of dedicated brain-training games in adults with mild cognitive impairment. Word Forge builds on this evidence with varied exercise types and adaptive difficulty.
Adaptive difficulty matters
All three MindGames adjust in real time to your performance — easing off when you struggle, increasing challenge when you’re ready. Research shows adaptive training is more effective than fixed-difficulty practice because it keeps you in the productive zone where learning happens.
You've had enough tests.
Blood tests, scans, assessments, forms. MindGames is different.
No pass or fail. No scores that judge your worth.
No time pressure on answers. You think at your own pace. (Chain Reaction has gentle per-link timers, but sessions have no overall clock.)
No one sees your results. This is private practice, not performance evaluation.
Stop whenever you like. Sessions aim for around five minutes. There is no minimum.
What you're doing is giving your brain low-stakes repetitions of skills it already knows: filtering, connecting, constructing, transforming. Over time, those repetitions build into something deeper — trusting your own mind again.
Small shifts. Real signals.
MindGames won't cure anything, and we won't pretend otherwise. But over weeks of regular play, people often notice:
Recovering from moments of “blankness” a little faster
Tolerating messy, ambiguous information more easily
Feeling less panicked when a word or idea doesn’t come instantly
Catching glimpses of your old strategic thinking surfacing
Those moments matter. They're signals that the core of you — the leader, the thinker, the decision-maker — is still present and capable. The games are just a way to give that part of you more chances to show up.
Simple by design.
Start small
Five minutes with one game is enough.
Pick what feels right today
Some days you’ll want the quiet focus of Word Forge. Other days, the momentum of Chain Reaction.
Notice how you feel
Not just how you “perform.” The point is practice, not proof.
Come back regularly
Your brain benefits from repetition — short, frequent sessions beat occasional marathons.
Start sharpening.
Signal & Noise is free. The full suite — with CJ in adaptive mode and progress tracking — is Plus. Community members get everything included.
$0
Signal & Noise — full access. CJ in basic mode. No progress tracking beyond current session.
USD $9/month or $79/year
All three games. CJ in full adaptive mode. Session history and progress tracking.
Included
Full Plus access included with your USD $50/year MTMOT membership. No separate subscription needed.
Learn about MTMOT membership →Your cognitive data stays on your device. We don't aggregate, compare, or share your performance data.
Join the waitlist.
MindGames is in build. Join the waitlist to get early access when we launch.
You are not broken.
Stepping away from leadership — especially because of illness — can leave you feeling like your value disappeared with your title. It didn't.
Your experience, judgement, and way of seeing the world are still there. They may be quieter right now. They may be buried under fatigue, fear, or side effects. But they are not gone.
MindGames is a simple, structured way of knocking on that door again. One signal found, one chain built, one word forged at a time.
Created by Carla Taylor
Service Excellence Strategist. AI Literacy Advocate. Returned Executive. Cancer warrior. Founder of MTMOT and host of the Make The Most Of Today podcast.
MindGames is a product of MTMOT (Make The Most Of Today). This app is a cognitive sharpening tool. It is not a medical device, a cognitive assessment tool, or a substitute for neuropsychological testing. Always consult your healthcare team for medical decisions.