We have long been attracted by quick solutions that could increase our intelligence. Today, people's hopes lie in brain training apps, some of which claim to result in smarter minds". But is this quick solutions all that it is said to be?
There are plenty of brain training apps, but they all share the same characteristics: they turn mental exercises like simple arithmetic, memory tests and logic and pattern-matching problems into quick games. The more you play these mini-games, the smarter you will get — or so some apps tell us. It is really a big promise.
Many of the apps say they are backed by "science", a claim I found surprising as a former neuroscientist. The concept that increasing intelligence would be as simple as practicing a few mini-games every day goes against what we have discovered about how humans think and learn.
After surveying a diverse spread of thousands of users across wide variety of apps, researchers at Western University in Canada discovered that "brain training has no appreciable effect on cognitive functioning in the ‘real world', even after extensive training periods". The positive effects that have been found are limited to the very specific mini-games and tasks that users are trained on, such as the ability to memorize lists of words or numbers, or perform mental arithmetic, with little benefit to other skills.
If you are expecting them to improve your ability to write novel or construct a complex spreadsheet, I am afraid you will want to look elsewhere.
Puzzle video games such as "Baba Is You" and "Returno the Obra Dinn" see players apply their skill at logic, memory and concentration in a far more complex way than any brain training mini-game.