Brain-Training Games: What They Improve and What They Do Not

In January 2016, the Federal Trade Commission reached a settlement with Lumos Labs, the company behind Lumosity, after accusing it of deceptive advertising. The ads suggested that a few minutes of games a day would sharpen performance at work and school and might even delay cognitive decline. The FTC said the science did not support claims that big. The case put into the open a question millions of people have while tapping through puzzles on their phones: is any of this doing something for me outside the app?

What improves, and what barely moves

The short answer is that you get better at what you practice. Play a sequence-memory game a hundred times and you will become excellent at remembering sequences of lit-up squares. The scientific argument is about transfer: whether that gain shows up in different tasks, like remembering where you left your keys, reasoning through a problem at work, or scoring higher on an IQ test.

In 2016, a team led by psychologist Daniel Simons reviewed the studies that brain-training companies cite, in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. They found good evidence that training improves the tasks being trained and sometimes closely related ones. Evidence that it improves general cognition or everyday life was thin. They also flagged design problems that kept recurring: weak control groups, small samples, and participants who knew what result was expected of them, which alone can tilt the outcome.

The exception worth noticing: the ACTIVE trial

The picture is not entirely gloomy. ACTIVE, a trial funded by the National Institutes of Health, followed roughly 2,800 older adults who got training in memory, reasoning or processing speed. Each group improved at the skill it practiced, and the benefit of the speed training lasted for years. A later analysis even pointed to a lower risk of dementia among people who got that training with booster sessions, though the authors themselves urge caution in reading it.

Read the fine print, though. These were older adults in a structured, supervised program, not someone playing for three minutes on the train. It is a serious lead for further research. It is not a license to assume any app works the same way.

Habits with better backing than a subscription

If the goal is to look after your mind over the long haul, the most consistent evidence points to things nobody bills you for monthly:

• Enough sleep. A tired brain does worse at everything, and no game makes up for it.
• Regular aerobic exercise, which is associated with better brain health at many stages of life.
• Learning something hard: a language, an instrument, a trade. It makes you coordinate many skills at once, and it is useful off the screen.
• A real social life. A dinner-table argument that goes somewhere is complex mental exercise, and it is free.
• Schooling, one of the few factors with a documented effect on performance on cognitive tests.

So what are puzzle games good for?

For a pleasant half hour, a sense of progress, and getting comfortable with the kind of problem that turns up on tests. What they cannot honestly promise is that they will "raise your IQ" across the board. There is even a subtle effect to keep in mind: repeat one type of exercise enough and your score on a similar test will creep up from sheer familiarity, not because you have a different brain.

How to size up an app before you pay

Before you hand over a credit card, put four questions to any product like this. First, who backs the claim: a peer-reviewed study, or testimonials and slogans? Second, what was the training group compared with? If the comparison was people who did nothing, the result is worth little, since any engaging activity might have produced the same effect. Third, did people improve at anything other than what they trained? And fourth, how long did the effect last? If the company cannot answer clearly, treat the promise as what it is, advertising.

It also helps to remember that a real but small gain can be marketed as a transformation. Two extra points on a lab task is not the same as "thinking faster in everyday life." The useful question is what changed in your actual day, not how far the chart inside the app climbed.

My own read, after going through what is available, is that there is nothing wrong with playing. What deserves skepticism is ongoing spending on a promise the research has not confirmed. If you like puzzles, enjoy them the way you would a crossword. If you want to protect your mind, sleep, move, and take up something that makes you work.

And if you are curious how you handle logic, pattern and memory questions with no magic promise attached, our test gives you a snapshot of today. Take it again in a few months and compare, in the spirit of a game.