ALFAA

ALFAA ELEVEN · Prove it yourself

The Clarity Check

Two minutes a day. Watch your focus sharpen.

A ~4-minute browser check of what the AM sachet moves the same day: reaction speed, sustained attention, and mental switching. The first few questions matter — sleep and timing swing your score more than any supplement, so we log them to keep the comparison honest.

PVT Built on the Psychomotor Vigilance Task — the method sleep-science labs, NASA and shift-work researchers have used for 40 years to measure alertness. Not a game: a validated instrument, run on your own baseline. See the science ↓
Alpha — the 8–12 Hz calm-alert brainwave
Sleep last night *
Alcohol last night *
When are you testing *
Want the cleanest proof? Run a paired A/B day: test just before your sachet, then again 45–60 min after. Testing yourself twice on the same day cancels out sleep and time-of-day, so the difference is far more likely to be the product.

The science & method

Why a reaction task is the honest way to measure focus

You can't feel a 30-millisecond change in your own alertness — but you can measure it. The Clarity Check is built on the Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT), the instrument sleep scientists reach for when they need an objective, repeatable read on how awake a brain actually is.

1What the PVT is

Developed by Dinges & Powell in 1985, the PVT is a simple idea run with scientific rigour: a signal appears at random intervals, and you respond as fast as you can. Do it for a few minutes and the pattern of your reaction times exposes lapses in attention that you'd never notice in the moment.

It became the field's gold standard for vigilant attention because of one rare property: you don't get better at it just by practising. Most "brain games" improve with repetition, so a higher score tells you nothing. The PVT barely has a learning curve — which means a change in your score reflects a change in your state (sleep, stress, a supplement), not your skill. That's exactly what you need to measure something day to day.[1,4]

It's used in sleep-deprivation research, NASA spaceflight studies, aviation and shift-work safety precisely because it's sensitive, objective, and hard to game.[3]

Anatomy of one trial

screen blank · you wait RANDOM 1–4 s tap here = false start GOLD CIRCLE APPEARS t = 0 · counter starts reaction time ≈ 250 ms YOU TAP 500 ms SLOWER = A LAPSE

Every trial times the gap between the signal and your tap. Jump early and it's a false start; react slower than 500 ms and it's logged as a lapse — a micro-moment where your attention let go.

2What we measure — and what each number means

Reaction speed

How fast you fire

Your mean reaction time and response speed (taps per second). The headline read of raw alertness — a rested, focused brain is measurably quicker.

Sustained attention

Whether you hold it

Lapses (reactions over 500 ms) and false starts. Average speed can look fine while attention flickers — lapses catch the flickers a feeling never would.

Mental switching

How nimbly you pivot

A cued task-switch measures accuracy and switch cost — the extra milliseconds it takes to change rules. This is executive function: the part caffeine + L-theanine is meant to sharpen.

3How we adapted it — honestly

The lab PVT runs 10 minutes. Nobody does that daily, so we use the PVT-B — the validated 3-minute brief version Basner & Dinges built for spaceflight, shown to detect the same sleep-loss effects as the full test.[2,3] We tightened it to roughly two minutes for the reaction block and paired it with a standard task-switch. Here's exactly what we kept and what we changed:

The research PVT / PVT-B
The Clarity Check
Random 1–4 s intervals so you can't anticipate
Kept — identical 1–4 s random wait
Lapse threshold at 500 ms; false starts flagged
Kept — same 500 ms lapse rule, early taps flagged
10-minute block (or 3-min PVT-B)
Shortened to ~2 min so it's done daily
Scored against population norms in a lab
Scored against your own baseline — your first clean sessions set your normal
Controlled lab, fixed conditions
We log sleep, alcohol & timing and ask for same device + same time of day

What this is — and isn't. It's a within-person wellness measurement that makes a same-day change visible, not a medical or diagnostic test. The honesty comes from the method: a baseline band before any verdict, noisy sessions held out, and the single cleanest read — a paired before/after on one day — cancelling out sleep and time-of-day so what's left is far more likely to be the product.

References

  1. Dinges DF, Powell JW. Microcomputer analyses of performance on a portable, simple visual RT task during sustained operations. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments & Computers. 1985;17(6):652–655.
  2. Basner M, Dinges DF. Maximizing sensitivity of the psychomotor vigilance test (PVT) to sleep loss. Sleep. 2011;34(5):581–591.
  3. Basner M, Mollicone D, Dinges DF. Validity and sensitivity of a brief psychomotor vigilance test (PVT-B) to total and partial sleep deprivation. Acta Astronautica. 2011;69(11–12):949–959.
  4. Lim J, Dinges DF. Sleep deprivation and vigilant attention. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 2008;1129:305–322.
Within-person wellness measurement, not a medical or diagnostic test. Data is stored only in this browser; if a Google Sheet URL is configured and the page is self-hosted, each session is also sent there. Reaction task is a 2-minute PVT-B (adapted from Basner & Dinges 2011); switching is standard cued task-switching. ALFAA ELEVEN.