Do brain training games raise your IQ?

What the evidence shows

In 2016, seven researchers led by Daniel Simons reviewed the studies that leading brain-training companies cite as support. They found extensive evidence of improvement on trained tasks, less on closely related tasks, and little on distantly related tasks or everyday cognition (Simons et al., 2016). None of the cited studies met all of the best practices the authors considered essential for clear conclusions about everyday benefits (Simons et al. 2016).

Studies of working memory training, one of the abilities these games target, point the same way:

• A 2013 meta-analysis of 23 studies found reliable short-term gains on working memory itself but no convincing evidence that the gains generalize to skills such as verbal and nonverbal ability (Melby-Lervåg & Hulme, 2013).
• A 2016 meta-analysis of 87 publications and 145 comparisons found no convincing evidence of far transfer when training was compared with a treated control group, and concluded the effects are short-term and specific (Melby-Lervåg et al., 2016).

What regulators said

On January 5, 2016, Lumos Labs, the maker of Lumosity, agreed to pay $2 million to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it made unfounded claims about its games (FTC 2016). The FTC said Lumosity claimed the games would improve performance at work and in school and delay cognitive decline. The order included a $50 million judgment, suspended because of the company's financial condition once it paid $2 million. The head of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection said Lumosity did not have the science to back up its ads.

Why it persists

The games do something visible: your scores in the app go up. It is natural to read that as getting smarter. Scientists also disagreed in public for a time. In 2014 one open letter from more than 70 scientists said brain games do not offer a scientifically grounded way to improve cognition, while another from 133 scientists and practitioners said the opposite (Simons et al., 2016).

What is actually true

• Practice improves the practiced task. That applies to IQ tests too: retesting raises scores by about 4 IQ points on average (Hausknecht et al., 2007).
• Little evidence shows that game practice raises general intelligence.
• Education has the strongest record: about 1 to 5 IQ points per additional year (Ritchie & Tucker-Drob, 2018).

Read can you raise intelligence, the page on working memory, and can you increase your IQ. Puzzles are still fun and good practice for test formats; our free puzzles make no promise beyond that. See also the Mozart effect.