Do Brain Training Apps Work? What the Research Says

It is the question that should come before you spend a cent on any brain training app: do these things actually work? The industry is worth billions and rests on an appealing promise — play some games, get sharper. We read the research so you can decide with clear eyes.

What “work” even means

To test brain training, researchers look for two distinct things:

• Near transfer — improvement on tasks closely related to what you trained. Practice a memory game, do well on a similar memory task.
• Far transfer — broad improvement in cognition that shows up on unrelated tasks and in everyday life.

Every brain training app implicitly promises far transfer. That is the claim that has to be tested.

What the research found

Near transfer is well established — train on a task and you get better at that task and similar ones. That is not in dispute.

Far transfer is harder. A landmark 2016 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest examined the research behind commercial brain training and found extensive evidence that training improves the trained tasks, less for closely related tasks, and little for distantly related tasks or everyday cognitive performance. Later analyses found the same pattern. A meta-analysis of working-memory training found short-term, task-specific gains that did not generalize to real-world cognitive skills, and a 2019 analysis that pooled earlier meta-analyses found that far-transfer effects shrank to zero once placebo effects and publication bias were accounted for.

The important exception

There is one genuine bright spot, and it deserves real attention because it is the strongest evidence in the field.

The ACTIVE Trial — Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly — was a large, NIH-funded randomized trial of 2,832 older adults, followed for many years. One specific type of training, speed-of-processing training, has the most striking long-term results. In a 10-year analysis, people assigned to speed training had a 29% lower risk of dementia than the control group, while memory and reasoning training showed no significant effect. A 20-year follow-up using Medicare records found about a 25% lower risk of a dementia diagnosis, but only for people who also did booster sessions.

These results are encouraging but not settled. Dementia was not the trial’s original outcome, so both findings come from later analyses, and an independent 2026 reanalysis found that none of the 20-year results stayed statistically significant after correcting for multiple comparisons. The National Institute on Aging also says there is not enough evidence that commercial brain training apps have the same effect as the training used in ACTIVE.

This is a big part of why BrainHQ, which offers Double Decision, the speed training exercise used in ACTIVE, scores well in our roundup. Be precise about what it shows, though: it is evidence for one type of training, studied in older adults — encouraging, but specific.

So should you use a brain training app?

The honest answer is not simply “no.” It depends on your expectations.

Good reasons to use one:

• You enjoy it — an enjoyable cognitive habit is a fine thing.
• You want structure — a daily session is a small, achievable anchor.
• You are an older adult interested in processing-speed training — where the evidence is strongest.
• You want to practice a specific everyday skill — apps like Elevate practice reading, writing, and math directly, though evidence that the gains carry over outside the app is limited.

Bad reasons:

• You expect to become broadly smarter — the evidence does not support this.
• You are using it instead of other things — that is the real risk.

What actually supports cognitive health

If your goal is a sharper, healthier mind, the research points to a set of unglamorous fundamentals — none of them an app:

• Physical exercise — some of the strongest evidence of anything for cognitive health.
• Quality sleep — when memory consolidates; poor sleep measurably impairs cognition.
• Social connection — consistently linked to better cognitive aging.
• Cardiovascular health — what is good for the heart is good for the brain.
• Genuine mental engagement — learning a language or instrument, real intellectual challenge.