Competition Finals: Brain Battle
Reidar Wasenius
Reidar Wasenius (FI)
Personal Brainer @ BRIIM Center
The Biohacker Summit participants had the opportunity to participate in a Cognitive Performance Test designed by the BRIIM Center Personal Brainer Reidar Wasenius. The four strongest performers were invited to the Brain Battle live on stage. These mental martial artists did their best to keep their head and beat the others in mind bending exercises. The winners got official gold, silver and bronze medals of the Finnish Brain Sports Federation plus other great prizes.
Reidar Wasenius from Bream hosts an engaging Brain Battle,
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Summary
- The Brain Battle at the Biohacker Summit featured four finalists selected for their high scores on cognitive performance tests to demonstrate the nature of competitive brain sports. - Finalists engaged in ivobics, a rhythmic brain exercise where they followed a color-coded counting pattern while focusing through distracting background music. - In the Memory Match event, competitors demonstrated recall by repeating and expanding an increasingly long sequence of random numbers between zero and one hundred. - The Mental Wrestling segment challenged participants to perform rapid addition and subtraction within a set numerical range, eliminating those who made mental calculation errors. - Danielle Bartlett won the competition, with Tom Appleton taking second place, and Vesa Waherma and Perry Chung finishing in a tie for third.
Article
Competition Finals: Brain Battle And Cognitive Performance With Reidar Wasenius
A Stage Became A Laboratory For The Mind
At the Biohacker Summit 2016 Helsinki, held in Helsinki, Finland, on Thursday 17 November 2016, the usual conference ritual of applause and polite attention gave way to something rarer and more electric: a public test of thought itself.
The event, titled **Competition Finals: Brain Battle**, was led by **Reidar Wasenius**, the Finnish “Personal Brainer” from the BRIIM Center and a leading figure in the Finnish Brain Sports Federation. Before a live audience, Wasenius brought four finalists on stage to demonstrate what competitive cognitive performance looked like when stripped of abstraction and placed under pressure.
This was not wellness as metaphor. It was concentration made visible.
The four finalists, selected from high performers in the Biohacker Summit cognitive performance tests, were **Danielle Bartlett**, **Tom Appleton**, **Vesa Waherma** and **Perry Chung**. They stood as contestants in a contest that asked for more than intelligence in the broad and flattering sense. It demanded disciplined focus, trained memory, tactical judgment and the ability to keep calm while the mind was being pushed into error.
As Wasenius told the audience: “What we are looking at here is a situation where you need to be very focused. That is being demanded of you and you also need to have a strong memory.”
Reidar Wasenius Framed Brain Sports As A Serious Discipline
Wasenius presented the Brain Battle as a compact demonstration of a wider world. He explained that he worked to help people become more skillful in the practical use of their brains and connected the evening’s contest to the traditions of Finnish brain sports, including competitions run by the Finnish Brain Sports Federation during Brain Awareness Week.
He also gave the audience the essential point of the evening: this was not entertainment dressed up as neuroscience, but a small and tangible glimpse into a competitive field where mental performance could be trained, measured and compared.
“We are arranging this brain battle as a small taste and an example of what brain sports are like,” he said.
That framing mattered. In an era eager to market cognition as a hack, a trick or a purchasable shortcut, Wasenius instead presented it as work.
The Warm-Up Began With Aivobics And Immediate Pressure
The opening challenge was **Aivobics**, a rhythmic mental warm-up combining counting, colour alternation and sustained attention, all while music played in the background. Contestants had to count upward while alternating colour cues, forcing the brain to hold sequence, rhythm and rule at once.
The task appeared almost playful until errors began to hover at the edge of every response. Competitors closed their eyes, tapped into the beat and tried to preserve a pattern while distraction pressed in. It was a small but revealing drama: the mind attempting order against interference.
Wasenius described the logic of the exercise with characteristic precision: “The idea here is to, without losing your focus, continue following a certain pattern.”
That sentence captured the spirit of the evening. Brain performance, in this context, was not simply about speed. It was about preserving structure when the conditions made structure difficult.
Memory Match Turned Recall Into Combat
If Aivobics exposed the fragility of concentration, **Memory Match** laid bare the architecture of working memory. Wasenius began by stating a number between zero and one hundred. The competitor repeated it and added another number. The sequence expanded turn by turn, requiring exact recall of every previous element in order.
What followed was a tense and often astonishing display of sequential memory. The lists lengthened, hesitation became expensive and every slip instantly revealed how narrow the margins were between command and collapse.
This was where strategy entered fully into view. Wasenius made clear that elite recall was not merely an inborn gift but a tactical act.
“When you learn to perform memory matches strongly, it means that you know how to select what you do. This is about tactics and strategy.”
The audience, many of them trying silently to follow along, quickly discovered the brutality of the exercise. By the time the chains of numbers stretched deep into double digits, the finalists were no longer merely remembering. They were organising, filtering and defending mental space in real time.
Mental Wrestling Demanded Speed Without Panic
The final round, **Mental Wrestling**, shifted the contest from recall to rapid calculation. Beginning from a fixed number, contestants had to add or subtract within strict numerical limits, ensuring they neither exceeded the upper boundary nor fell below the lower one. The task sounded simple enough until pace, fatigue and public scrutiny began to exert their force.
Here, the competition grew harsher. Small arithmetic mistakes brought elimination. The room heard not only numbers but the sound of cognition under strain, each answer both continuation and risk.
This segment was perhaps the purest expression of the evening’s theme. Competitive thinking is not simply having knowledge. It is the ability to manipulate that knowledge quickly, accurately and under duress. The brain was being asked to juggle rules, inhibit impulse and calculate with precision while moving at speed.
Wasenius had prepared the audience for exactly this kind of internal contest. “We are looking forward to a tossing back and forth of objects in your mind where you need to have a very strong memory,” he said earlier. By the final round, that image had become almost literal.
Danielle Bartlett Emerged As The Winner
After the scores were calculated backstage, Wasenius returned to announce the results. The margins, he said, were narrow, a reflection of an unusually high standard among the finalists.
**Danielle Bartlett** won **gold**, delivering the strongest overall performance across the competition’s demands. **Tom Appleton** took **silver**. **Vesa Waherma** and **Perry Chung** finished in a **tie for bronze**, prompting the need for an additional bronze medal.
The result was fitting not only because Bartlett prevailed, but because the contest itself had shown how fine the differences were at this level. A missed sequence, a rushed subtraction, a momentary loss of pattern, these were enough to separate first from second, podium from near miss.
The winners received the official gold, silver and bronze medals of the Finnish Brain Sports Federation along with additional prizes, but the most striking reward was more intangible: visible proof that cognitive excellence can be tested in public and earned through discipline.
A Competition That Revealed The Trainable Nature Of Attention
What lingered after the medals was not simply the leaderboard. It was the event’s insistence that mental performance could be cultivated like any other high-level skill. Focus could be trained against distraction. Memory could be strengthened by method. Agility could be sharpened through repetition and pressure.
The Brain Battle at Biohacker Summit 2016 Helsinki was, on its face, a compact live contest. Yet it also served as a quiet argument against passivity. The mind was not treated as a static trait but as an instrument, one that demanded practice, resilience and design.
For a conference audience accustomed to hearing about optimisation, Reidar Wasenius offered something more demanding and more honest: a demonstration that the brain improves not through slogans, but through deliberate work.
By the end of the evening, under the lights in Helsinki, cognition had ceased to be an abstraction. It had become a sport.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2016 Helsinki