Do games that train your brain really help? Here are the facts!

You’ve probably seen ads for apps that promise to make you smarter in just a few minutes a day. You can buy and download hundreds of programs that are called “brain training.”

The point of these simple games is to challenge your mind and improve your ability to do important tasks you do every day.

But will clicking on your phone to watch animated fish swim or flashing street signs really help your brain work better?

A few months apart in 2014, two large groups of scientists and mental health professionals came to the same conclusion about how well these kinds of brain games work.

People with years of research experience and knowledge in areas like cognition, learning, skill acquisition, neuroscience, and dementia were part of both groups. Both groups carefully looked at all of the same evidence that was available at the time.

But they said exactly the opposite things.

One person came to the conclusion that “there isn’t much evidence that playing brain games improves broad cognitive skills or helps people deal with the complexity of everyday life.”

The other person said that “a large and growing body of evidence shows that certain cognitive training programs can significantly improve cognitive function, even in ways that apply to everyday life.”

These two statements, which are at odds with each other, show that experts disagree about a lot of things, including what counts as convincing evidence that something is true.

Then, in 2016, the US Federal Trade Commission stepped in with a series of rulings, including a US$50 million (later reduced to $2 million) judgement against one of the most heavily advertised brain training packages on the market.

The FTC decided that Lumos Labs’ ads, which said that its Lumosity brain training program could improve people’s cognition, make them better at school and work, protect them from Alzheimer’s disease, and help treat ADHD symptoms, were not based on evidence.

What are people supposed to believe when there are different claims, scientific findings, ads, and government decisions? Does it make sense to spend your time and money on brain training? What, if any, benefits can you hope for? Or would it be better to do something else with your time?

I am a cognitive scientist and a member of the Institute for Successful Longevity at Florida State University. I have spent nearly 20 years studying how people think, how they perform, and how different kinds of training affect these things. I’ve done lab studies that directly tested the ideas that brain training companies say are at the heart of their claims.

Based on these things, my optimistic answer to the question of whether brain training is worth it would be “we just don’t know.” But it’s possible that the real answer is “no.”

How well does research show how things are getting better?

My coworkers and I have argued that most of the relevant studies don’t go far enough to say for sure one way or the other.

Some of these problems have to do with statistics.

Studies of brain training often look at how it affects attention, memory, reasoning, and other cognitive skills over time. This plan makes sense if you want to find all of the possible gains.

But every time a test is given, there is a chance that the scores will get better just by chance. The more tests that are done, the more likely it is that at least one will be a false alarm.

Studies on brain training that give a lot of tests but only report one or two important results can’t be trusted unless the number of tests is taken into account. Unfortunately, many studies don’t do this, which makes it hard to believe what they find.

Another problem with the design is that there aren’t enough control groups. To say that a treatment worked, you have to compare the group that got the treatment to a group that didn’t.

People who get brain training might, for example, do better on an assessment test just because they’ve already taken it, both before and after training. Since the control group also takes the test twice, it can be shown that practice doesn’t make you smarter.

Many studies that have been used to show that brain training works have compared its effects to those of a control group that did nothing. The problem is that a placebo effect could easily explain any difference seen between the training group and the control group.

Placebo effects are improvements that aren’t directly caused by a treatment. Instead, they happen because people expect to feel or do better after getting a treatment. This is an important thing to think about in any intervention study, whether the goal is to learn how a new drug or brain training product works.

Researchers now know that doing something makes it more likely that things will get better than doing nothing. Because the possibility of a placebo effect is becoming more clear, the standards for testing how well brain games work are changing.

Now, studies are much more likely to use an active control group, which is made up of people who do something else besides brain training.

Still, these active controls don’t do enough to keep expectations in check.

For example, a person in a control group that does computerized crossword puzzles or watches educational videos probably won’t see as much improvement as a person who is given fast-paced and adaptable commercial brain training products that are marketed as being able to improve cognition.

But commercial brain training is still said to work based on studies with these kinds of flaws. Researchers still don’t do many studies that try to measure expectations to learn more about possible placebo effects and find ways to stop them.

Participants in our studies do form expectations based on their training condition, and they are especially hopeful about how brain training will affect them.

There is a big problem when people in different groups have different expectations, because there is more and more evidence that cognitive tests, like memory, intelligence, and attention tests, can be affected by the placebo effect.

Is there a likely way to make things better?

Another important question to answer is whether or not brain training works. That is, given what scientists know about how people learn and pick up new skills, should we expect training on one task to improve performance on a different, untrained task?

This is the main claim that brain training companies make: that playing games on a computer or mobile device will help you do things that have nothing to do with the game you’re playing.

“Speed of processing training” is an example of something that has been added to commercial brain training products. The goal here is to make it easier to see things in the background, which can help you avoid a car crash.

A brain game might show nature scenes with birds in the background. Players have to find specific birds, even if they only see the image for a short time. But can finding birds on a screen help you see and avoid, say, a pedestrian who steps off the curb while you’re driving?

This is very important. Few people care a lot about getting a better score on a computerized brain training exercise that is all about abstract ideas. Improving their ability to do everyday tasks that are important for their safety, well-being, independence, and success in life is what is important.

But research done over the past century shows that learning and training tend to lead to very specific gains. It can be hard to move skills from one task to another.

Think about the person known as “SF.” With a lot of practice, he was able to remember numbers with seven to 79 digits. After training, he was able to hear a list of 79 numbers that were made up at random and repeat them back right away, perfectly.

But he could still remember about six letters of the alphabet and say them back.

This is just one example of how people can get much better at one task but show no improvement at all when given a different challenge. If training to remember numbers doesn’t help you remember letters, why would training to spot virtual birds help you drive, do better in school, or remember things in your everyday life?

Keeping your mind sharp

Brain training programs seem like a good way to get smarter quickly. But it probably won’t be easy or quick to improve or keep your mind sharp. Instead, it might take a lifetime, or at least a long time, of mental challenges and learning.

What should you do if you’re worried about your mind?

First of all, if you play brain games and enjoy them, please keep doing so. But don’t get too far ahead of yourself. If you’re only playing to get cognitive benefits, you might want to try something else, like learning a new language or playing an instrument, which might be just as stimulating or at least more enjoyable.

Some evidence suggests that physical activity might help keep your mind sharp. Even if exercise did nothing for your mind, it is clear that it is good for your body, so why not move around a bit?

The most important thing I’ve learned from reading about training is that if you want to get better at a task that’s important to you, you need to practice it. You might only get better at brain games if you play them.