Does Brain Training Work? A Look at the Research

By Eduard-Dragos Condria · Published October 10, 2026 · 8 min read

Brain-training games improve the games. Whether that carries over to everyday thinking is a different question, and the research is not encouraging.

Brain-training apps and games promise sharper memory, faster thinking and protection against cognitive decline. The honest summary of two decades of research is this: people get better at the training tasks, sometimes at very similar tasks, and rarely at anything broader. Whether you should bother depends on what you expect from it.

What the claims rely on

The industry rests on an appealing idea: the brain adapts to practice, so practising "cognitive skills" should strengthen them in general, like a gym for the mind. The adaptation part is real. The leap to general improvement is where the evidence gets thin.

The key concept is transfer. Near transfer is improvement on tasks similar to the trained one. Far transfer is improvement on different tasks or on real-life performance. Training reliably produces near transfer. Far transfer is what companies advertise and what studies struggle to find.

The large studies

• The BBC study (Owen et al., 2010, Nature). More than 11,000 people trained online for six weeks on reasoning, memory and planning tasks. They improved on the tasks they practised. There was no evidence that the gains carried over to untrained tasks, even closely related ones.
• The ACTIVE trial (Ball et al., 2002). Older adults received speed-of-processing, memory or reasoning training. Each group improved in its trained domain, and those gains lasted for years. At ten years the reasoning and speed groups reported less difficulty with daily activities (Rebok et al., 2014), and the speed group had a lower rate of dementia diagnosis (Edwards et al., 2017). These are among the more encouraging results in the field, but they concern one specific, clinician-delivered programme in older adults, not commercial games in general.
• Working-memory training meta-analyses. Melby-Lervåg and Hulme (2013) and Melby-Lervåg, Redick and Hulme (2016) pooled many studies and found short-lived near-transfer effects and little evidence of far transfer, with results weaker in studies that had active control groups.

The expert consensus statements

In 2014 a group of more than 70 cognitive scientists signed an open letter saying there was no compelling scientific evidence that brain games reduce cognitive decline. A competing group argued the opposite, but a systematic review commissioned by a major scientific body (Simons et al., 2016, Psychological Science in the Public Interest) examined the studies cited by brain-training companies and concluded that the evidence did not show that such training improves everyday cognitive performance, and that many studies had methodological flaws such as no active control group and expectation effects.

The US Federal Trade Commission also took action against Lumosity in 2016 over advertising claims that its games could help with school, work and age-related decline.

Why it is hard to find broad effects

• Placebo and expectation. People who believe they are training do better on follow-up tests, even when the training is inert. Studies without a believable active control overestimate benefits.
• Practice effects. Taking a test twice improves scores on the second attempt regardless of training.
• Strategy learning. Participants discover tricks that work on the trained game, not on underlying capacity.

What does have better evidence

If the goal is better thinking in daily life, the best-supported measures are less glamorous:

• Physical activity. Regular aerobic exercise is linked with better executive function and lower dementia risk in observational work; randomised trials show smaller but positive effects on some cognitive measures.
• Sleep. Adequate sleep protects attention and memory. See sleep and cognitive performance.
• Education and intellectually engaging activity. Formal education raises cognitive test scores (Ritchie and Tucker-Drob, 2018, meta-analysis). Learning something complex, such as a language or an instrument, is rewarding in its own right.
• Cardiovascular risk control. Managing blood pressure and other vascular risks is associated with better cognitive ageing.
• Strategy training. Teaching specific memory strategies, such as chunking and the method of loci, improves performance on the tasks where people apply them. See how to improve working memory.

Is it ever worth playing?

Puzzles and games are fine as entertainment, and for people who enjoy them there is no evidence of harm. The mistake is to pay for a subscription on the promise of general brain improvement. A useful test: does the evidence the company cites involve independent trials, active control groups and real-world outcomes? If the evidence is a before-and-after score on the company's own game, it is not enough.

Our own tests are not training. They are measurement tools: the working memory test and the IQ test estimate where you stand on a given day, and repeating them is likely to improve your score a little through familiarity, not ability. Keep that in mind when you compare results.

Sources

• Owen, A. M., et al. (2010). Putting brain training to the test. Nature, 465, 775–778.
• Simons, D. J., et al. (2016). Do "brain-training" programs work? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17(3), 103–186.
• Melby-Lervåg, M., & Hulme, C. (2013). Is working memory training effective? A meta-analytic review. Developmental Psychology, 49(2), 270–291.
• Melby-Lervåg, M., Redick, T. S., & Hulme, C. (2016). Working memory training does not improve performance on measures of intelligence or other measures of "far transfer". Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(4), 512–534.
• Rebok, G. W., et al. (2014). Ten-year effects of the ACTIVE cognitive training trial on cognition and everyday functioning in older adults. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 62(1), 16–24.
• Edwards, J. D., et al. (2017). Speed of processing training results in lower risk of dementia. Alzheimer's & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventions, 3(4), 603–611.
• Ball, K., et al. (2002). Effects of cognitive training interventions with older adults: A randomized controlled trial (ACTIVE). JAMA, 288(18), 2271–2281.
• Ritchie, S. J., & Tucker-Drob, E. M. (2018). How much does education improve intelligence? A meta-analysis. Psychological Science, 29(8), 1358–1369.