pistachio: test your senses

how good are your senses, really? short tests for your reflexes, your eye for color, your ear for pitch, your sense of time, your memory and your steadiness. most take under a minute. at the end you get a shape — the things you're good at, and the things you're not. WHAT IT MEASURES speed — how fast you answer the world. tap the moment it lights, or pick the right one of four. sight — hold a color in your head, then mix it back. count what flashed. sound — find the pitch, hear the odd note out, catch a gap in the noise. space — judge a vertical with the room lying to you, pace out a distance, unfold a shape in your head. time — hold a length of time without counting, keep a beat once it stops. mind — repeat a sequence that grows every go. balance — stand on one leg while it reads the sway you can't feel. hold a phone out and let it measure the tremor everybody has. body — a heartbeat, through the camera. ONE A DAY, THE SAME ONE FOR EVERYBODY the calendar picks it, not us. there's a mark to clear rather than a queue to stand in — clearing it is worth saying out loud, and falling short isn't worth saying at all. when you're done you can send a row of squares: the grid carries the shape of the run, the raw number carries the fact. BETTER WITH SOMEONE ELSE hand the phone across the table and play the same test one after the other. the second score stays hidden until you've both finished, so nobody is aiming at a number. or send a link — they can open it with nothing installed, play in a browser, and send one back. there's a board for the last seven days, one entry per person per test, which you can decline or leave whenever you like. BUILT TO BE HONEST every test traces to a real published paradigm — the psychomotor vigilance task (Dinges & Powell), Corsi block-tapping, the rod-and-frame test (Witkin & Asch), Vierordt's law — and where a phone can't honor the paradigm, it says so instead of quietly fudging it. scores are pistachio's own scale, not a mark out of a hundred. there are no percentiles, because a second yardstick turns the first one into decoration. the raw measurement is always there underneath: milliseconds, cents, a match out of ten. where the comparisons are thin, they're labeled provisional, because they are. free, no account needed, no ads. pistachio is not a medical device. nothing it measures diagnoses anything, and a low score is not a symptom. if something here worries you, talk to a doctor rather than to a phone.