Can Brain Training Make You Smarter? What the Evidence Says

Can brain training make you smarter? Based on the current evidence, not in the way most apps imply. Training almost always improves the specific task you practice, but that gain rarely spreads to general intelligence, and the gap between those two things is where most brain training marketing quietly falls apart.

Does brain training actually raise intelligence?

The honest answer is that the evidence is weak and contested. Psychologists distinguish between near transfer, where your improvement carries over to very similar tasks, and far transfer, where it carries over to different abilities such as reasoning or intelligence, and the pattern across studies is consistent, because near transfer happens readily while far transfer mostly does not. One of the largest tests of this idea came in 2010, when Owen and colleagues trained more than 11,000 people for six weeks and published the results in Nature, finding clear improvement on every trained task yet no evidence of transfer to untrained tasks, even closely related ones (Owen et al., 2010, Nature).

Key takeaway: People almost always get better at the game they practice, but that improvement rarely generalizes to intelligence, so getting a higher score is not the same as getting smarter.

What about the famous working memory study?

There was one widely cited exception that kept the debate alive. In 2008, Jaeggi and colleagues reported in PNAS that training on a demanding working memory task called the dual n-back improved fluid intelligence, which is the ability to reason and solve new problems (Jaeggi et al., 2008, PNAS). The finding was exciting and heavily publicized, yet it did not settle the question, because later attempts to replicate it produced mixed results, and a 2016 meta-analysis by Melby-Lervåg, Redick, and Hulme pooled 87 publications and found reliable gains only on tasks close to the training, with no convincing evidence that working memory training improved intelligence or other far-transfer measures (Melby-Lervåg et al., 2016).

Key takeaway: A single striking result is not the same as a settled science, and once dozens of studies are pooled together, the case for training your way to a higher intelligence largely disappears.

Why do brain training claims sound so convincing?

Because improvement is real and easy to feel, which makes the leap to intelligence feel intuitive even when it is not supported. A 2016 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest examined the field in depth and concluded there was no strong evidence that brain training programs produce broad improvements in cognition, school performance, or work performance beyond getting better at the practiced tasks themselves (Simons et al., 2016). The stakes of overstating this are not hypothetical either, since in 2016 the US Federal Trade Commission fined the maker of Lumosity two million dollars for advertising that its games could stave off cognitive decline and improve everyday performance without the science to back it up (FTC, 2016).

Key takeaway: Feeling yourself improve is convincing, but it is exactly the feeling that lets overstated intelligence claims spread, which is why regulators have already stepped in.

So what is brain training actually good for?

It is genuinely good at what the evidence supports, which is improving and measuring specific, well defined abilities. Rather than promising a higher IQ, the useful move is to pick a clear ability such as reaction speed or short term memory, measure it with a consistent method, and watch how it changes over time against your own baseline rather than against a generic average. That is the approach Mentation takes, because its exercises are built on published measurement paradigms and report plain numbers and deltas, and it deliberately does not claim to make you smarter, since that claim would run ahead of the science.

Not a medical device. For educational purposes only.