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What a Brain Age Score in an App Actually Is

An app's brain age is a performance index mapped onto an age label by the publisher. A research brain age is derived from MRI. The two share only a name.

By Published Updated 5 min read

Reign Creative LLC makes IQ Test & Brain Training Games, which this article links to, so we have a commercial interest in it. How we write and check articles.

Key takeaways

  • Two unrelated things are called brain age. In research it is an estimate derived from brain imaging; in a consumer app it is a performance index that the publisher has chosen to label with an age.
  • The research version, BrainAGE, is computed from structural MRI using a model trained on scans of healthy people, and the reported figure is the gap between the estimate and the person's actual age.
  • An app cannot do any of that. It has your tap timings and answer accuracy, so any age label it prints is a mapping decision made by the developer rather than a measurement of tissue.
  • Because the number is a performance index, it moves with sleep, caffeine, familiarity with the format and how many times you have played — none of which says anything about your brain's condition.
  • Our own app, IQ Test & Brain Training Games, includes an IQ-style test, a memory test and a reaction time test; its listing calls their results estimates based on app activities, not clinical or professional assessments, so apply the same caution to any figure it shows you.

A brain age score in a phone app is a performance index with an age label attached. You answer questions, the app combines your accuracy and your response times into a number, and that number is mapped onto an age through a rule the developer wrote. There is no biology in the chain. The same phrase is also used for something entirely different in neuroimaging research, and the collision of the two meanings is why the app version feels more authoritative than it is.

The research version is an imaging estimate

In neuroimaging, brain age estimation trains a model on brain scans from healthy people of known ages, then applies it to a new scan. The BrainAGE framework, described in a review covering its first decade, derives its estimate from structural T1-weighted MRI: the images are preprocessed, the data reduced, a regression model is trained on healthy reference brains, and the model's estimate for an individual is compared with that person's actual age.

The quantity of interest is the gap, not the estimate. As the review puts it, "The difference between a person's estimated brain age and its chronological age finally identifies the individual deviation from the typical maturation/aging trajectory." Positive values indicate an estimate above chronological age.

That is a research instrument with a defined input, a documented model and an active methodological literature about its limitations, including how prediction error varies across the age range. Whatever its open questions, it begins with a picture of a brain.

The app version has no such input

An app has two observations about you: whether you answered correctly, and how long each answer took. That is it. There is no scan, no biological sample, no clinical norm sample and no examiner. So any age label the app prints must be produced by the same two observations passed through a mapping the developer chose.

That mapping is a design decision, not a measurement. Two apps given identical performance can print ages a decade apart, because the choice of which index value corresponds to "34" is arbitrary in the sense that nothing external fixes it. It can be tuned to make most users feel good, or tuned to make improvement look dramatic, and neither choice is detectable from the outside.

This is where the questions in reliability and validity in testing earn their keep. Ask what the norm sample is. Ask what evidence supports the interpretation that a lower printed age means anything about you. Ask whether the figure has a published margin of error. For an app-generated brain age, all three questions usually terminate immediately, which is itself the answer.

Why the number moves, and what that does not prove

Performance indices are noisy, and everything ordinary moves them: sleep, time of day, caffeine, whether you are sitting still, the size of the screen, whether someone spoke to you mid-round. Reaction-time measures in particular are sensitive to all of these.

The largest effect, though, is familiarity. The second time you meet a task format you are faster, because you already know the layout, the rhythm and what the instructions mean, before any change in the underlying skill. An age label that improves over a week of daily play is consistent with getting better at that specific game and nothing else. The general version of this problem — improvement on the trained task, uncertain transfer to anything else — is the substance of do brain training apps work and of working memory and training.

The scientific consensus statement issued jointly by the Stanford Center on Longevity and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development states the position bluntly: "there is little evidence that playing brain games improves underlying broad cognitive abilities, or that it enables one to better navigate a complex realm of everyday life", and it concludes that claims promoting brain games "are frequently exaggerated and at times misleading."

Regulators have already addressed this style of claim

The Federal Trade Commission's 2016 action against the maker of Lumosity is the reference case. The FTC announced a settlement including $2 million in consumer redress over advertising that claimed the program would improve performance "on everyday tasks, in school, at work, and in athletics" and would "delay age-related cognitive decline and protect against mild cognitive impairment, dementia, and Alzheimer's disease", together with claims about a range of health conditions.

The agency's own business-guidance post framed the evidentiary question in terms any reader can apply: if a person's game scores go up, "does that 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?" The settlement required human clinical testing before the company could make a broad range of cognition claims.

An age label is a compressed version of exactly the claim the FTC examined. It asserts, in one number, that your performance corresponds to a stage of life. Nothing an app can observe supports that inference.

Where our own app fits

IQ Test & Brain Training Games is our own app, built by Reign Creative. It is published as an educational game, and it includes an IQ-style test, a memory test and a reaction time test alongside its brain games, with personal bests, accuracy, streaks, response speed and an assessment history to compare against. Its Google Play listing does not describe a brain-age feature, and it states that IQ test, memory test and other results are estimates based on app activities, not medical, psychological, clinical or professional diagnostic assessments.

Those numbers are worth reading for one narrow purpose — comparing your own runs on the same activity at the same difficulty — and not as a statement about your brain. Arithmetic drills such as Multiplication Rush, Addition Sprint and Mixed Operations get you faster at arithmetic. Memory rounds on numbers, sequences, grids and delayed recall get you better at those rounds. Treat any figure the app shows, test results included, the same way: an estimate of how you did on its tasks, never a measure of how old your brain is.

Keeping practice, entertainment, educational activity and standardised psychological assessment distinct is the discipline that makes the rest of this subject readable — including what IQ tests actually measure, which is the cornerstone of the IQ tests and reasoning hub. More practice and memory material sits in the education and brain category, and the app itself is described on the IQ Test & Brain Training Games app page.

Good to know

Frequently asked questions

What is a brain age score?
It depends entirely on who produced it. In neuroimaging research, brain age is an estimate produced by a model trained on brain scans from healthy people, and the number of interest is the gap between the estimate and the person's real age. In a game or app, brain age is a score on the app's own tasks translated into an age label by a rule the developer chose. The two are unrelated procedures sharing a name.
How does an app calculate brain age?
From whatever it can observe, which is your accuracy and your response times on its own exercises. Those are combined into an index and mapped onto an age band through a lookup the publisher defines. Nothing in that chain involves imaging, biology or a clinical norm sample, and the mapping is a design choice rather than a finding. Two apps can print very different ages from the same performance.
Why does my brain age change so much between sessions?
Because it is a performance score, and performance is noisy. Sleep, time of day, caffeine, distraction, the device you are using and — most of all — how familiar you are with the specific task format all move it. Repeated play tends to improve the number simply through familiarity, which is why an improving age label is not evidence that anything about you has changed.
Does IQ Test & Brain Training Games give you a brain age?
Its Google Play listing does not describe a brain-age feature. It does describe an IQ-style test, a memory test and a reaction time test, and states that their results are estimates based on app activities, not medical, psychological, clinical or professional diagnostic assessments. Whatever figure the app shows, the points in this article apply to it: it is an estimate built from your performance on the app's own tasks, not a measurement of your brain. The app is published as an educational game.

Sources

  1. Ten Years of BrainAGE as a Neuroimaging Biomarker of Brain Aging: What Insights Have We Gained? (opens in a new tab)Frontiers in Neurology — accessed
  2. Lumosity to Pay $2 Million to Settle FTC Deceptive Advertising Charges for Its "Brain Training" Program (opens in a new tab)U.S. Federal Trade Commission — accessed
  3. Mind the gap: What Lumosity promised vs. what it could prove (opens in a new tab)U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Business Blog — accessed
  4. A Consensus on the Brain Training Industry from the Scientific Community (opens in a new tab)Stanford Center on Longevity and Max Planck Institute for Human Development — accessed

About the author

— The independent app studio that builds the apps covered on this site and publishes every article here. On Google Play it publishes as Reign Collective Apps.

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