We run a site full of puzzles. A fair number of people land here because they searched something like “games that make you smarter.” So we are in an awkward position to ask the next question honestly, which is exactly why we should be the ones to ask it: do brain games actually work?
The short version is that it depends entirely on what you mean by “work.” If you mean “will I get better at the game,” yes, reliably, and that is not very interesting. If you mean “will this raise my general intelligence or hold off cognitive decline,” the honest answer is that the evidence is thin, contested, and a lot weaker than the marketing for these products has implied for years. We would rather tell you that up front than sell you a story.
The practice effect is real, and it is almost the whole effect
Here is the least surprising finding in this entire field: if you do a thing a lot, you get good at that thing.
Spend a month on Sudoku and you will get faster at Sudoku. You will start to see the naked pairs and hidden singles without hunting for them. That is genuine skill, and it feels great. But it is also just practice, the same way doing a lot of parallel parking makes you better at parallel parking. The open question was never whether you can improve at the trained task. It was whether that improvement spills over into anything else. Researchers call that spillover “transfer,” and transfer is where the whole promise lives or dies.
The biggest test of this is worth knowing about. In 2010, a team led by the neuroscientist Adrian Owen published a study in Nature called “Putting brain training to the test.” They ran more than 11,000 people through six weeks of online brain-training exercises built to improve reasoning, memory, planning and attention. The result: participants got measurably better at the tasks they trained on, and there was no evidence of transfer to untrained tasks, even ones that were closely related. People got better at the games. They did not get generally smarter. You can read the study summary in Nature yourself.
The scientists do not fully agree, and that matters
It would be tidy to stop there and declare brain games useless. The honest picture is messier, and we are not going to flatten it.
In 2014, the Stanford Center on Longevity and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development published a consensus statement signed by about 70 scientists. Their conclusion was blunt: there is little evidence that brain games improve broad cognitive ability or help you navigate daily life, and none that they cure or prevent Alzheimer’s. Then something telling happened. More than 100 other researchers signed an open letter pushing back, agreeing with much of the statement but objecting to the word “consensus,” because in their reading certain specific training programs do show benefits worth taking seriously.
So the real state of the science is not “it works” or “it is a scam.” It is a genuine disagreement among serious people, where the skeptics have the stronger hand on the big claims (general intelligence, dementia prevention) and the optimists have a few specific, narrower results they can point to. Anyone who tells you it is settled in either direction is selling something.
One of those narrower results deserves a fair hearing. The ACTIVE trial, a long-running study of older adults, found that a particular kind of “speed of processing” training showed unusually durable effects, and a later analysis linked the group that got extra booster sessions to a delayed dementia diagnosis years down the line. That is a real and interesting finding. It is also one specific, carefully designed intervention, not the grab-bag of mixed mini-games most “brain training” apps actually sell, and the researchers themselves are careful about how far to push it.
Why a \$2 million fine hangs over all of this
The reason this question carries any heat at all is that the industry got out over its skis, and a regulator called it.
In January 2016, the US Federal Trade Commission settled with Lumos Labs, the maker of Lumosity, for \$2 million. The FTC’s complaint was that Lumosity had advertised its games as able to improve performance at work and school and to stave off age-related cognitive decline, dementia and other conditions, without the science to back those claims. The agency’s line was sharp: the company had “preyed on consumers’ fears about age-related cognitive decline.” That settlement is the backdrop for every honest conversation about brain games now, including this one. It is the cautionary tale, the way the fired-for-Solitaire story is the cautionary tale of playing at your desk.
We bring it up because we sell games too, and we would like to not become a cautionary tale.
So why do we still think you should play
If brain games will not reliably make you smarter, you would expect a company that makes them to go quiet here. We are going to do the opposite, because there is a genuinely good case for playing, and it does not require a single inflated health claim.
A few minutes on a puzzle is a good break. It pulls your attention off a stressful inbox and onto something bounded, solvable and low-stakes. The worst outcome of a lost hand is a lost hand. There is decent reason to think the in-the-moment effect on mood and focus is real, even when the long-term cognitive effect is uncertain, and a better mood at 3pm is worth something on its own terms. A round of Memory Match while the kettle boils is not an investment in your future IQ. It is just a small, pleasant thing, and small pleasant things are allowed to be the entire point.
There is also the boring, durable truth that the things with the best evidence for a healthy brain are the unglamorous ones: sleep, exercise, staying socially connected, learning something genuinely new. A puzzle can be part of a life that has those things in it. It cannot replace them, and we are not going to pretend a free card game is a substitute for a walk.
So play because it is enjoyable. Play because it is a clean way to spend ten minutes. Play because the daily Sudoku is a small ritual that makes the morning slightly better. Those are honest reasons, and they are the only ones we are willing to stand behind. If anyone, including us, ever tells you a puzzle will make you smarter, ask them for the study, and then check who paid for it.