WOULD you turn down the chance to become a genius? We have long been fascinated by quick fixes that could increase our intelligence, not only in science fiction like Flowers for Algernon and Limitless, but in 鈥渟mart drugs鈥� like modafinil, a treatment for sleep conditions that some erroneously believe can make us smarter. Today, people鈥檚 hopes lie in brain training apps as a speedy 鈥渄igital pill鈥�, some of which claim to result in 鈥渟marter minds鈥�. But is this quick fix all it is cracked up to be?
There are plenty of brain training apps, mostly on smartphones, 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 鈥� or so some apps tell us. It is an alluring promise: instead of hard study or drugs, you just need to play a few fun games every day.
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The use of game mechanics for serious purposes, or 鈥済amification鈥�, has become widespread with the advent of the internet and smartphones. Brain training apps are at the fore, frequently featured by Apple and Google鈥檚 app stores.
Many of the apps say they are backed by 鈥渟cience鈥�, a claim I found surprising as a former neuroscientist. Even if there were consensus around what constitutes general intelligence (which there isn鈥檛), the notion that increasing it would be as simple as practising a few mini-games every day flies in the face of what we have discovered about how humans think and learn.
Several major studies of brain training apps, surveying a diverse spread of thousands of users across a wide variety of apps, have found that they have little to no effect on users鈥� performance. A by researchers at Western University in Canada discovered that 鈥渂rain training has no appreciable effect on cognitive functioning in the 鈥榬eal world鈥�, even after extensive training periods鈥�. The positive effects that have been found are to the very specific mini-games and tasks that users are trained on, such as the ability to memorise lists of words or numbers, or perform mental arithmetic, with little transferability to other skills.
So, if your career or your calling in life involves being able to do sums quickly or remember all your friends鈥� phone numbers, you may be satisfied with these apps. But if you are expecting them to improve your ability to write a novel or construct a complex spreadsheet, I am afraid you will want to look elsewhere.
Yet despite the lack of strong evidence that they work, brain training apps continue to flourish, partly because of their misleading invocation of 鈥渟cience鈥� and partly because users think they will be fun.
As a co-creator of one of the most popular forms of gamification (Zombies, Run!, a smartphone fitness game), what is especially disappointing about these apps is that they just aren鈥檛 that fun 鈥� at least, not compared with the endless variety of thoughtful board games and video games released every day.
Puzzle video games such as Baba Is You and Into the Breach, as well as detective games like Return of the Obra Dinn and Her Story, see players exert their skill at logic, memory and concentration in a far more complex way than any brain training mini-game. And if you aren鈥檛 into games, or learning how to dance is likely to be more effective than a brain training app in keeping your mind sharp as you age.
These activities might not promise to increase your intelligence, but I can promise they will engage your brain deeply while having fun 鈥� which is something I can鈥檛 say of brain training gamification.
Adrian Hon is the author of聽You鈥檝e Been Played and the CEO and founder of Six to Start
