Your dlPFC score measures how well one small part of your brain recovers after it has been made to work.

The region behind your decisions

That part is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region just behind your forehead that handles executive function: planning, holding information in mind, resisting distraction, and making decisions under pressure.

It's the region you lean on in a difficult meeting, a tight final ten minutes of a match, or a long day of small judgement calls. When we scan you, we ask it to work, then watch what happens next.

Most people have never had this measured. Blood tests made the body's chemistry visible decades ago; the brain has been the last unmeasured biomarker. This score is one of the first ways of seeing it, and of seeing it again a few months later.

Think of it as a muscle

The simplest way to understand the score is to treat the dlPFC like a muscle. When a muscle works, it needs more oxygen, so blood flow to it rises. When the work stops, blood flow settles back. How quickly and how fully it does that tells you a lot about the health of the tissue and the vessels feeding it.

The brain does the same thing, region by region. During the scan you complete short tasks that make the dlPFC work hard: holding a sequence in mind, or naming a colour while the word on screen says something else. The region responds with a rise in oxygenated blood. Our headset measures that rise, and what happens to it afterwards, using time-domain fNIRS, a non-invasive form of neuroimaging that reads oxygen levels in the outer layers of the brain through the scalp.

That response, measured during cognitive effort, is the raw material of your dlPFC score. It isn't a test of how clever you are. It's a reading of how the region's blood supply behaves when you ask it to perform.

Why recovery slows with age

Blood reaches the dlPFC through a dense network of capillaries, the smallest vessels in the body. With age, that network thins. Fewer capillaries means the region can't be resupplied as quickly after effort, so the recovery of blood flow slows down. This is the same reason an older runner's legs take longer to come back between intervals: the engine is fine, but the plumbing has fewer lines.

This is why the score matters beyond the scan room. In our research with Imperial College London, age was the single biggest driver of how strongly the dlPFC responded to effort. A stronger response also went with faster reactions on the tasks: people whose region recruited more blood flow responded more quickly. Recovery and reaction speed are, in effect, two views of the same underlying capacity.

Two things in that research are worth holding on to. The response was stable enough within a person to track over time, which is what makes it a usable marker rather than a one-off curiosity. And sleep and physical activity each added their own small, independent contribution on top of age, which means some of what drives the score sits within your control.

What the score means, and what it doesn't

A single dlPFC score is a starting point, not a verdict. Cognition isn't static; it shifts with sleep, stress, age, and daily life, and so does the blood flow behind it. One scan tells you where you are today. The useful information comes from the second, third, and fourth scans, when we can separate real change from everyday variability and show you your own trajectory against your own baseline, not someone else's norm.

So a higher score is not a prize and a lower score is not a warning. It's a measurement of how one part of your brain is performing and recovering right now, which you can then watch move as your training, sleep, and routine change.

It's also important to say what the score is not. It doesn't diagnose any condition, predict future health, or tell you what to do about it. Connectome measures performance, not pathology. The measures are not intended for diagnostic use, and they're part of ongoing research and development, which means they may be refined as the science matures. The decisions stay yours. The data speaks for itself.

For clinicians and performance teams: what sits underneath

The marker is the peak task-evoked oxygenated haemoglobin (HbO) response in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, measured with time-domain fNIRS during cognitive control tasks (2N-Back and Stroop). It's a haemodynamic measure of regional recruitment during executive demand, not an electrical one, and not a behavioural proxy.

The evidence base is the LUCID study, run with Imperial College London: 92 healthy adults, three sessions roughly ten days apart, with consumer wearable sleep and activity data alongside. Three results carry the marker's weight. Greater peak dlPFC activation was associated with faster median reaction time across both tasks and both hemispheres (r = -0.37 to -0.53, all p < 0.001), the neural-efficiency relationship. Repeated measurement produced stable individual baselines, with ICCs of 0.56 to 0.77 across measures and the bilateral Stroop composite the most reliable at 0.747. And age was the strongest predictor of activation, with sleep and physical activity adding small but independent variance on top.

Reliability is metric-specific. Aggregating hemispheres beats either alone, and some derived measures, hemispheric laterality among them, are not stable enough within a person to use as individual markers. The within-person baseline is what makes the dlPFC score suitable for tracking change in an athlete or a patient over a season or a programme, rather than ranking them against a population on day one.

The full methods and figures are in the LUCID preprint on bioRxiv, currently being updated for peer-review submission.

Watch it over time

One scan is interesting. Four scans over time is intelligence. The dlPFC score is built to be revisited: it gives you a baseline for the part of your brain that does the hardest thinking, and then shows you how that baseline moves as your life does.

You can't take care of what you can't clearly see or reliably measure. Now you can see this. If you'd like to find out where your own baseline sits, book a scan at our Soho clinic. If you run a clinic or a performance team and want to bring the measure into your own programme, we'd love to talk.

The measures are not intended for diagnostic use. The normative values applied are preliminary, not gender- or age-specific, and should be interpreted with caution. These metrics are part of ongoing research and development, and may be modified or excluded from the final product.