Brain Training Myths, Answered One at a Time

The short version: practice makes you better at what you practised, and almost every disputed claim in this category is an attempt to extend that sentence. Below are nine things people repeat about brain games, each answered in a paragraph or two with the evidence that settles it — and, where it is relevant, what our own app does and does not do.

IQ Test & Brain Training Games is built by Reign Creative. Its claim register is worth stating up front, because several answers below depend on it. It includes an IQ-style test, a memory test, a reaction time test and a personality questionnaire with a Big Five profile, alongside brain, memory, logic, focus, vocabulary and mental math games, and it tracks personal bests, accuracy, streaks, response speed and an assessment history. Its Google Play listing states that the test results are estimates based on app activities, not medical, psychological, clinical, educational-placement, employment or professional diagnostic assessments, and it makes no claim about cognitive decline, diagnosis or transfer to untrained skills.

Myths about what training does

"Brain games make you smarter"

They make you better at the games. In October 2014 a group of cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists convened by the Stanford Center on Longevity and the Berlin Max Planck Institute for Human Development published a consensus statement concluding that claims promoting brain games are frequently exaggerated and at times misleading, and that there is little evidence that playing them improves underlying broad cognitive abilities. Their sharper point was about marketing: small, narrow and fleeting advances are often billed as general and lasting improvements of mind and brain.

Getting faster at two-digit multiplication is a real gain. Calling it an increase in intelligence is a different and unsupported claim.

"Brain training holds off dementia"

The evidence does not support that claim. The same consensus statement said no studies demonstrate that brain games prevent or cure Alzheimer's disease. In January 2016 the US Federal Trade Commission announced a settlement with Lumos Labs, maker of Lumosity, over advertising the agency said the company could not substantiate — including claims that training would delay age-related cognitive decline and protect against mild cognitive impairment, dementia and Alzheimer's disease. The order included $2 million in consumer redress against a suspended $50 million judgment.

That enforcement action is the clearest marker in the field of where an advertising claim crosses a line.

"So brain training does nothing at all"

This is the overcorrection, and it is also wrong. A 2020 meta-analysis in Scientific Reports pooled sixteen randomised controlled trials covering 1,543 participants aged sixty and over, and found small but statistically significant improvements in processing speed, working memory, executive function and verbal memory, with no significant effect for attention or visuospatial measures. The authors were explicit about the limitations: assessors were rarely blinded, only three of the sixteen studies used intention-to-treat analysis, and several domains rested on a handful of studies.

"Some measurable gains, narrow, with methodological caveats" is a less satisfying headline than either "makes you smarter" or "it is a scam". It is also closer to what the literature says. The longer version of this argument, including how the evidence weakens with distance from the trained task, is in our brain training explainer.

"Training working memory transfers to everything else"

Working memory is the most heavily trained construct in the category, precisely because it correlates with so much. Whether training it moves anything other than the trained task is a long-running and genuinely contested argument, which is why what working memory is and whether training changes it exists as its own article rather than a paragraph here.

Myths about the brain itself

"You only use ten percent of your brain"

False, and directly examined rather than merely doubted. The University of Washington's Neuroscience for Kids resource states that there is no scientific evidence for the claim and that we use one hundred percent of our brains, pointing to functional imaging showing activity across regions, to evolutionary arguments about the metabolic cost of brain tissue, and to the severity of disability caused by even small amounts of damage. BrainFacts, published by the Society for Neuroscience, gives the same answer and notes how much of the myth's current life it owes to film.

"People are left-brained or right-brained"

Also false as a personality claim. A 2013 study in PLOS ONE examined resting-state functional connectivity in 1,011 people and found that although left- and right-lateralised networks genuinely exist, lateralisation is a local property of particular networks rather than a whole-brain trait. The authors reported that the data were not consistent with a whole-brain phenotype of greater left-brained or right-brained network strength across individuals.

Hemispheric specialisation is real. "I am a right-brained person" is not what it means.