Do Brain Training Apps Work? What the Evidence Supports

They make you better at themselves. Whether that carries anywhere else is the whole argument, and the honest summary is that the evidence weakens the further you get from the exercise you practised.

This article is published by Reign Creative LLC and we publish a brain-training app. That is a direct commercial interest in your answer to this question, and the conclusion below applies to our product on exactly the same terms as to everyone else's. We have not written ourselves an exemption.

Last verified: 15 September 2026.

How we checked

Statements about other companies' products were read on those companies' own websites on 15 September 2026 and are reported as what those pages said. Regulatory statements come from the US Federal Trade Commission's own published press releases and business guidance. Where a page displays award or rating claims we have not repeated them, because we have not verified them and repeating an unverified figure is how this category got its reputation. Product pages change without notice; check the current ones yourself.

The transfer problem, which is the only real question

Nobody disputes that practice improves the practised task. If you do a digit-span exercise for three weeks, your digit span on that exercise will improve. That is not in question and never has been.

The question is transfer: does the improvement generalise?

The literature divides this into near transfer — to closely related tasks — and far transfer, to different tasks and to everyday functioning. The summary position, as the reference literature puts it, is that there is a great deal of evidence that brain training improves performance on trained tasks, but less evidence in closely related tasks, and even less on distantly related tasks.

A 2017 National Academies report is cited as finding moderate strength evidence for cognitive training as an intervention to prevent cognitive decline and dementia, while also finding almost no evidence that brain training generalises to everyday cognitive performance. Those two findings sit together uncomfortably, which is a fair description of the whole field.

And the disagreement is not confined to methodologists. In 2014 a group of more than 70 scientists stated that brain games cannot be scientifically proven to be cognitively advantageous; another group of more than 130 scientists argued that there is valid evidence for the benefits of brain training. Two large groups of qualified people looked at the same literature and reached opposite public conclusions. Anyone summarising this as settled — in either direction — is telling you something the field does not support.

Our companion article on working memory and training goes into the construct itself and the meta-analyses in more depth. This page is about what the products claim.

What the regulator actually found

The most useful primary source in this area is not a study. It is an enforcement action.

On 5 January 2016 the Federal Trade Commission announced that Lumosity would pay $2 million to settle deceptive advertising charges relating to its brain training program. The FTC charged that Lumos Labs had claimed its games could:

• improve performance on everyday tasks, in school, at work, and in athletics;
• delay age-related cognitive decline and protect against mild cognitive impairment, dementia, and Alzheimer's disease;
• reduce cognitive impairment associated with health conditions including stroke, traumatic brain injury, PTSD, ADHD, the side effects of chemotherapy, and Turner syndrome.

Jessica Rich, then Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection, put it this way: "Lumosity preyed on consumers' fears about age-related cognitive decline, suggesting their games could stave off memory loss, dementia, and even Alzheimer's disease. But Lumosity simply did not have the science to back up its ads."

The FTC's own business guidance post on the case is the clearest statement of the transfer problem we have found anywhere, including in the academic literature. It frames the question as: does a result establish a boost in memory, focus and productivity that will translate into tangible day-to-day benefits, or does it just show that the person got better at playing the game?

That is the question. It is worth carrying into every product page you read.

It was not an isolated action, either. A year earlier, in January 2015, the FTC settled with the makers of a children's game called Jungle Rangers over claims that it permanently improved children's focus, memory, attention, behaviour and school performance, including in children with ADHD. The pattern the regulator was addressing was an industry pattern, not one company's excess.

What the products claim now

Ten years on, the marketing has changed, and reading it closely is instructive.

Lumosity's own site describes the product as exercising memory, flexibility and more, with the tagline "Science. That feels like games.", and states that the program adapts to individual strengths and weaknesses. It describes a randomised study with 4,715 participants who completed it, training five days a week for 15 minutes against a control group doing crossword puzzles, and reports that after 10 weeks Lumosity users improved more than the control group on the company's assessments of working memory, short-term memory, processing speed, problem solving, fluid reasoning and overall cognitive function.

Then it adds this, in its own words: "These results are promising, but more research is needed to determine the connection between improved assessment scores and everyday tasks."

That sentence is the settlement, absorbed. It is a materially more careful claim than the one the FTC acted on, and it is worth acknowledging as such rather than treating a decade-old enforcement action as the last word on a company.

Peak's site describes games testing focus, memory, problem solving and mental agility, more than 40 games and activities, and a Pro tier with tailored workouts and performance analysis. It states that the company works with scientists studying the impact of video games from Cambridge, Yale, UCL and King's College London, and brings customers games built using that research. Note what that is and is not: a claim about the provenance of the game designs, not a claim that using them produces general cognitive improvement. The page also displays award badges and user reviews, which we have not verified and are not repeating.

Elevate's page describes strengthening reading, writing, speaking, memory and math across 40+ games, and characterises them as science-backed brain games without citing specific studies on the page we read. It displays an award claim and a rating claim which, again, we have not verified and are not restating.