Blanked vs Impulse
a wide brain-training app from Mind App Studio
Impulse gives you a big buffet of mini-games across memory, attention, math, and language. Blanked picks one of those skills, visual memory, and goes deep. If you want variety, Impulse. If you want to actually get sharper at one thing in two minutes a day, Blanked.
On paper Blanked and Impulse look like the same thing: a brightly colored brain-training app on your phone. In practice they are built around opposite ideas. Impulse is a buffet. Blanked is a single dish, cooked carefully.
Impulse spreads its training across roughly forty mini-games covering memory, attention, mental math, language, and logic. The pitch is breadth: dip into a different skill each day, complete a daily routine, watch your overall "brain index" climb. Blanked does not have a brain index. Blanked has six game modes, all built around the same core mechanic: study a scene, the screen goes blank, answer from memory.
This page walks through how the two apps actually compare on focus, session length, free tier, friend features, and the science each one leans on. The short version is at the top of the page; the honest detail is below.
About Impulse
Impulse is a brain-training app published by Mind App Studio. It bundles dozens of short mini-games covering memory, attention, mental math, and language, and it pushes a daily training routine that takes about ten minutes. It launched on the App Store in 2020 and has grown quickly through paid acquisition.
Head-to-head
- You want to actually get sharper at one specific skill, not skim ten of them
- You have two minutes a day, not ten
- You want the full game without a daily-game paywall
- You want to challenge a friend on the exact same scene
- You like variety and want to dip into different cognitive skills each day
- You enjoy the gamified streak / daily-routine format
- You are happy with a longer session and a subscription
The science behind each app
Impulse, like most general brain-training apps, leans on the broad claim that doing short mental exercises sharpens cognitive function. Mind App Studio has not published peer-reviewed studies of Impulse specifically, so the science behind the app is the science behind the wider brain-training category, which is genuinely contested.
The most-cited consensus paper here is Simons and colleagues (2016), a comprehensive review for Psychological Science in the Public Interest. Their conclusion was deflating for the category: short cognitive games do reliably make you better at the games themselves, and at very closely related tasks, but the evidence that these gains transfer to broader real-world abilities like everyday memory, attention, or "general intelligence" is weak. This is true for Impulse, for Lumosity, for Blanked, and for every app in this space. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something.
What the research does support is more specific: training on visual short-term memory tasks improves performance on visual short-term memory tasks (Engle and Kane, 2004; Klingberg, 2010). That is what Blanked is built around. We do not promise it will help you do your tax return faster. We do promise that if you train your visual recall every day for two minutes, your visual recall will get sharper, because that is the one thing the research consistently shows.
Impulse, by trying to train ten different skills, ends up doing each in shorter bursts. That is not necessarily bad, but it is closer to entertainment than to focused cognitive training. Choose accordingly.
- Simons et al. (2016), "Do Brain-Training Programs Work?", Psychological Science in the Public Interest
- Engle & Kane (2004), "Executive Attention, Working Memory Capacity, and a Two-Factor Theory of Cognitive Control"
- Klingberg (2010), "Training and plasticity of working memory", Trends in Cognitive Sciences
The bottom line
Impulse is a perfectly fine app if you want a playful daily routine that touches a bit of everything. The mini-games are well-made, the UI is friendly, and ten minutes a day is not a lot to ask.
Blanked is the better choice if you actually want to get sharper at one thing, you want to do it in the time it takes to drink half a coffee, and you want the full game without a paywall blocking three quarters of it.
Both apps make some version of the "brain training works" claim. The honest answer, backed by the research, is that training transfers narrowly. Pick the app whose narrow training matches what you actually want to improve.
Want to compare for yourself? Visit Impulse's site.
Train your memory. Play Blanked free.
A free visual memory game built around how memory actually works. 6 game modes, 400+ levels.
Download on the App StoreFrequently asked questions
Is Impulse free to use?
Impulse has a free tier with a limited number of daily games, but most of the catalog and the deeper progression are behind a subscription. Blanked is fully free to play, with an optional Blanked+ subscription that removes ads and adds cosmetics, not gameplay.
Will Impulse make me smarter?
Honest answer: no app will. The research consensus (Simons et al., 2016) is that brain-training apps reliably improve performance on the specific games they contain, but those gains do not transfer to general intelligence. Pick an app for the specific skill you want to sharpen, not for vague promises of overall cognitive improvement.
Which is better for memory specifically?
Blanked, by design. Impulse has a memory category, but it is one of many. Blanked focuses entirely on visual memory across six game modes and 400+ levels. If memory is your goal, the deeper, more focused practice wins.
How long does each app take per day?
Impulse pushes a roughly ten-minute daily routine. Blanked is two minutes. The compounding effect of a habit you actually keep matters more than the length of any single session.
Does Impulse have friend challenges like Blanked?
No. Impulse has leaderboards but no head-to-head challenges. Blanked lets you send a friend the exact same scene and questions you saw, so you can compare scores fairly.
Is Blanked available on Android?
Not yet. Blanked is iOS-only at the moment. Android is on the roadmap. Impulse is on both.
Last updated: 30 April 2026 · back to all comparisons