Brain-Training Games Won't Boost Your IQ
The Games May Be Fun, but Study Shows Players' Cognitive Abilities Don't Improve
April 20, 2010 -- Think brain training will make you smarter? Think again! New research in Nature shows that the brain-training games played by millions of people don't boost IQ.
In the study of more than 11,400 healthy adults, those who played brain-training games did get better at the specific tasks involved in the games, such as solving mathematical problems, but these improvements did not transfer into any other general mental abilities.
"I was surprised to find that millions of people are in involved in these activities, but there was very little solid, peer-reviewed scientific evidence that shows it works," says Adrian M. Owen, PhD, a neuroscientist and assistant director of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, England, in a telephone news conference. "If you are doing it for fun, it's fine, but if you expect improvements in your IQ or general function, our data suggests they will not make you any smarter overall."
Brain Training Study
In the experiment, which was launched by a BBC science show called Bang Goes the Theory, participants were placed into one of three groups after taking an online test to serve as a benchmark of their mental skills. People in one group honed their reasoning skills with brain-training games aimed at improving planning and problem-solving ability. Participants in another group played brain-training games designed to sharpen their short-term memory, attention, mathematical abilities, and visual-spatial skills. A comparison group was asked to answer general knowledge questions by surfing the Internet.
Participants were asked to train for 10 minutes a day, three days a week for six weeks, but many put in even more time.
None of the brain-training tasks transferred into improvements in any other mental abilities. The participants did get better in the specific tests that they practiced, and the more they trained, the better they got in these specific tasks, the study showed.
"Even for the people that trained more than average, there was still no translation to any general improvement in cognitive function," says study researcher Jessica A. Grahn, PhD, also with MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, during the telephone news conference. "Some of things they were practicing, like getting faster at math, may be useful in and of itself. But if you are [brain training] to see a generalized improvement in overall function, the evidence does not support it."