When discussing brain training, people should not confuse silly marketing claims for bad

science. Brain training is probably one of the fastest growing sections in modern psychology.

To put this in context, we are talking about the development of low cost software products,

apps or games that claim to be able to increase people’s intelligence or IQ, something that

some psychologists like to think of as a trait that cannot be improved.

Researchers (such as Chancellor and Chatterjee from the University of Pennsylvania, see

Brain Branding: When Neuroscience and Commerce Collide) have argued that the

relationship between neuroscience research and the marketing of brain training products has

become too close for comfort, raising ethical questions about how academic research is

related to commercial gain. Probably in no other area of psychological research have we seen

such a use and abuse of neuroscience terminology for marketing purposes. The web is full of

promises that neural processes that brain training game and tool developers cannot support,

sometimes based on spurious theories and poor scientific reasoning.

The challenge for brain training companies and products is to find the very specific tasks that

stimulate the brain in such a way that it leads to improvements in general brain health and

intellectual functioning. Evidence for this has not been so easy to come by as most brain

training companies do not undertake any scientific research.

SO LET US SEPARATE THE SCIENCE FROM THE MARKETING.

We have all heard of the various reviews of brain training programs, that most often conclude

that the effects are not worth getting too excited over. The main finding is that while brain

training improves skills in the precise domain being targeted, the effects do not generalize to

related skills or everyday life. In other words, brain training games simply make you better at

brain training games. These reviews are welcome and an important part of the scientific

process, and in many cases they are well conducted. However, there is an important point that

can be easily missed when particular programs are assessed in large randomized controlled

trials. That is, that the effectiveness or otherwise of a particular tool, does not inform us about

the principals involved in brain training. The real question is; in principle, can forms of

intellectual stimulation lead to generalized improvements in other related but dissimilar areas

of intellectual functioning? One series of studies that answer a resounding YES to this

question are those conducted by John Jonides and colleagues at the University of Michigan.

Their research has found improvements in objective measures of fluid intelligence (one

important aspect of intelligence) resulting from training on a free and easily obtainable task

called the n-back task. There is no commercial interest held by these researchers in the n-back

task, which is in the public domain. These effects on intelligence have even been found to last

over the longer term (several months at least). While we do not yet fully understand how the

n-back tasks serves to improve fluid intelligence, the finding now offers the opportunity for

more focused empirical and conceptual work to understand the processes involved.

RaiseYourIQ's own research (we are first and foremost psychologists and educators) into

intellectual improvements does not fit easily into a neuroscience paradigm, but it nevertheless

represents another example of basic bottom-up research, done on fundamental cognitive

processes (specifically, skills known as relational framing skills which our own Doctor Bryan

Roche has edited), that appear to underlie intellectual ability. We are concerned about

whether or not intelligence does rely on the fluency of these particular skills sets, and how to

best train those skills.

The concern over the effectiveness or otherwise of particular Brain Training products, could

easily obscure the great advances being made in our basic understanding of intelligence and

how to increase it. Missing the bigger questions in this arena, would be as disastrous as

giving up on cancer research just because a bunch of maverick pharmaceutical companies

made premature promises about particular commercially available treatments for cancer.

Let’s not mistake the commerce for the science, and let's not throw out the baby with the

bathwater. To read more on the science behind RaiseYourIQ visit Brain Training Science