Brain Science
Simon Says tests sequential working memory, the ability to hold and replay an ordered list.
Simon Says in MyRin presents a sequence of colored buttons lighting up in order. Watch. Then replay it exactly. Each successful round adds one more flash to the sequence. It continues until you make an error. The score is the longest sequence you successfully reproduced.
The task seems deceptively simple at 3 to 4 flashes. At 7 to 8 flashes it becomes genuinely difficult. At 10+ flashes it stops being a game and becomes a rigorous test of working memory capacity. This gap between how easy it looks and how hard it gets is the puzzle's entire mechanism, and understanding why it gets hard is the first step to extending how far you can go.
Simon Says is a pure sequential working memory task. Working memory is the cognitive system that temporarily holds and manipulates information in conscious attention. Unlike long-term memory, which can hold essentially unlimited information over months and years, working memory is small and time-limited. George Miller's 1956 research established that the average adult can hold approximately 7 items (±2) in working memory at once. This "magical number" has been refined since, with more recent research suggesting 4 items as the true capacity for pure chunks without grouping strategies.
The sequential component adds another constraint. It's not enough to remember that the sequence contained red, blue, and green, you must remember that it was red, then blue, then green, and not green, then red, then blue. Ordered recall is substantially harder than unordered recall. It taxes the phonological loop, the working memory subsystem that maintains items in sequence through a kind of internal rehearsal.
Simon Says's difficulty increases linearly with each new flash, but the cognitive load it imposes increases faster than linearly. Each additional item doesn't just add one unit of memory demand, it also adds one more positional relationship that must be maintained. At 9 flashes, you're not just holding 9 colors; you're holding 9 colors in 9 specific positions, with 8 inter-item relationships between them.
The most effective technique for extending sequential memory span is chunking, grouping individual items into larger units. Miller's original 7±2 limit applies to chunks, not individual items. A chunk can contain multiple items as long as they form a recognizable pattern that can be stored as a single unit.
In Simon Says, chunking means grouping flashes into sets of three. Instead of trying to hold nine individual flashes, you hold three chunks of three:
Three chunks of three fit well within working memory's capacity. Nine individual items do not. The replay is then chunk-by-chunk: retrieve chunk 1, replay all three, retrieve chunk 2, replay all three, and so on. The chunking structure acts as a retrieval framework that prevents individual items from falling out before you get to them.
The practical application in MyRin: as you watch the sequence, group every three flashes in your mind before the next group begins. Give each group a label, a color description, a spatial pattern (left-right-left), or any other pattern that helps the group cohere as a single unit.
Working memory has multiple subsystems. The phonological loop handles verbal and auditory information; the visuospatial sketchpad handles visual and spatial information. Simon Says's flashes engage the visuospatial system primarily, colored buttons lighting up is a visual task. But you can recruit both systems simultaneously.
Dual encoding means adding a verbal label to the visual input. As each button flashes, say the color name quietly, or sub-vocalize it (mouth the word without sound). "Red, Blue, Green, Green, Red." This engages the phonological loop alongside the visuospatial sketchpad, giving the sequence a second memory representation. Two independent encodings of the same information are significantly more robust than one.
Research on dual coding (Paivio, 1971) consistently finds that information encoded in two modalities is recalled more accurately and at longer delays than single-modality encoding. Simon Says is a fast task, the flashes don't linger, which makes dual encoding especially valuable, because the verbal encoding persists slightly longer than the visual trace.
The practical caveat: sub-vocalization needs to be fast enough to keep up with the flashes. At low speeds this is easy. At higher difficulty settings the sequence speeds up, and if your verbal labeling falls behind the visual input, it adds confusion rather than clarity. Practice sub-vocalization at low speeds until it becomes automatic before relying on it at higher speeds.
Most players lose Simon Says streaks not because they failed to remember the sequence but because they mis-tapped during replay. They remembered correctly and executed incorrectly. This is a different problem from memory, it's a motor execution problem, and it has a different solution.
MyRin's Simon Says does not time the replay phase. You can take as long as you want between flashes during your turn. This means the game rewards deliberate, careful replay over rapid execution. Each tap should be intentional, select your button, tap it cleanly, confirm the color, and retrieve the next item from memory before moving to the next tap.
The error pattern most players have: they replay quickly because they're afraid of "losing" the sequence from memory. In practice, the sequence doesn't evaporate in two seconds. The deliberate approach, one confirmed tap at a time, produces significantly fewer mis-taps than the rushed approach, without meaningfully increasing memory decay. Controlled replay is almost always better than rushed replay.
Sequential working memory trained in Simon Says is the same cognitive resource used in a range of high-demand tasks: following multi-step verbal instructions, tracking the thread of a complex argument, recalling a sequence of steps in a procedure, or holding the order of items in a list long enough to act on them. It is a general resource, not task-specific.
Studies on working memory training (Jaeggi et al., 2008; Susanne Jaeggi's n-back research) show measurable transfer from sequential memory tasks to general fluid intelligence assessments, with the strongest effects when training occurs consistently over multiple weeks. Simon Says in MyRin is a precisely structured training instrument for exactly this capacity.
The target for systematic training: consistently reaching sequences of 9 to 10 in Simon Says requires chunking skill and dual encoding combined. Most untrained adults plateau around 6 to 7. The gap between 7 and 10 is trainable within 4 to 6 weeks of daily practice, not through memorization, but through better encoding strategies applied consistently.