By Nicholas Singh, Founder of MindFit®. Reviewed by MindFit® Clinical Advisors.
TL;DR
- Getting better at brain games only makes you better at brain games. It doesn’t carry over to work stress, hard conversations, or keeping your head when something goes wrong.
- That’s the far transfer problem. A skill only shows up in situations that look like where you learned it. Train puzzles, get better at puzzles. That’s where it stops.
- So MindFit® trains the skill where you actually need it. Composure under pressure gets trained under pressure. There’s no gap to cross, and that approach has controlled evidence behind it.
On this page: Do they work? · The transfer problem · Why MindFit is built differently · What that looks like · FAQ
Brain training became a multibillion-dollar industry on one promise: play these puzzles for a few minutes a day and get sharper at life. Good pitch. It’s also the part that hasn’t held up.
Do brain games actually work?
They work at the thing they train. Not much past that.
Seven researchers went through the entire field and published the results in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. They found solid evidence that brain training improves the exact tasks you practice. Weaker evidence for tasks that look similar. Almost nothing for tasks that don’t, or for everyday thinking. They also found that a lot of the studies had design problems bad enough that you can’t draw conclusions from them (Simons et al., 2016).
So the games do something. Practice matching symbols and you’ll get quicker at matching symbols. But that’s the whole result. You didn’t improve your memory, you improved your score on one memory game. Nothing underneath it moved. What the evidence doesn’t show is that any of this helps you make a better decision, remember a name, or hold it together in a meeting.
In 2016 the biggest brain training company paid $2 million to settle FTC charges. The claim they couldn’t back up was that their games improved performance at work and school.
The field isn’t unanimous. In 2014 two groups of scientists published opposing open letters, one saying the benefits were oversold, another with more than a hundred signatories saying the gains were real. The review above is the more careful piece of work, but the argument is still open.
The transfer problem
Underneath all of it is one idea: transfer. Does a skill you build in one place show up somewhere else?
Near transfer means the new situation looks like the old one. That works. Far transfer means it doesn’t. That barely ever works. Working memory training is one of the most studied approaches out there, and it hasn’t been shown to improve intelligence or anything else at a distance (Melby-Lervåg, Redick and Hulme, 2016). Researchers have been trying to produce far transfer for about a century. Some now think it just isn’t how people learn.
That’s the real finding, and it’s bigger than brain games. Any product that has you practice one thing to get better at a different thing is betting against a hundred years of evidence.
Why MindFit® doesn’t have this problem
We’re not making that bet.
You only need far transfer when the training and the target are different things. Train pattern recognition, hope for better judgment. Train a memory game, hope for a calmer Monday. There’s a gap, and it has to be crossed.
We don’t ask you to cross it. If the goal is composure under pressure, the training is composure under pressure. If the goal is holding it together when someone says something that lands badly, that’s what the workout puts you in. Practice looks like the real thing on purpose. That’s near transfer, and near transfer works.
We didn’t invent this. It’s called stress inoculation training, built in clinical psychology in the 1980s: teach the skill, then rehearse it under real pressure instead of in a quiet room (Meichenbaum and Deffenbacher, 1988).
And here’s the part that matters for a post about transfer. The same idea runs through sport and police training under a different name, pressure training, and there it’s been tested properly. Researchers pooled 14 controlled studies covering 394 people, from beginners to elite athletes to serving officers. Practising under simulated pressure produced a solid improvement in performing under pressure, and it worked for the beginners and the elites alike (Low et al., 2021). The literature is still small, and oddly the shorter programs did better than the longer ones. But it points one way.
What none of this ever had was a way to reach anyone outside a clinic or a national team.
Want to know where you stand? The free Mental Fitness Test scores you across nine attributes in about five minutes.
What that looks like in practice
Four things follow from it.
Train the skill itself. Managing stress. Steadying a reaction. Holding focus when you’re loaded up. Not a puzzle that stands in for them.
Train under pressure, not in the calm. A skill you’ve only practiced while relaxed has a long way to travel before it shows up on a bad day. Our workouts put you under real pressure, using techniques from clinical psychology, so the practice matches the moment.
Train, don’t score. Brain games are built around beating a number, which turns the session into a test. Training is repetition and rising load, with nothing to win.
Progressive overload. The workouts get harder as you go from Novice to Elite, the same way the weight goes up. Harder training, easier life.
We’ve run one 12-week pilot with 30 people. Average Mental Fitness Test scores rose 8.2 points, and most reported better coping and lower stress. Worth saying plainly what that is: self-reported, no control group, 30 people. It’s an early signal, not proof. We haven’t run a controlled trial and we won’t pretend otherwise. What we can give you is the reasoning, the evidence behind the method, and a design that doesn’t lean on the one thing this field has never delivered.
See for yourself. Try a live exercise and find out what training under pressure feels like.
Frequently asked questions
Do brain training apps improve intelligence?
The evidence says no. The biggest review of the field found brain training improves the tasks you practice but does little for distant abilities or everyday thinking (Simons et al., 2016). A separate meta-analysis of working memory training found no improvement on measures of intelligence (Melby-Lervåg, Redick and Hulme, 2016).
What is the far transfer problem?
Transfer is whether a skill learned in one place shows up in another. Near transfer, to something similar, happens. Far transfer, to something very different, almost never does. Far transfer is exactly what brain training promised.
How is MindFit® different from a brain training app?
A brain game trains you on one task. You get faster at that task, and there’s no sign the memory or attention underneath it got any better. We train the capacity itself, under the pressure you’d need it in, so there’s no distance for it to travel. That approach has been tested in sport and police training, where it’s called pressure training, and a meta-analysis of 14 controlled studies found it improves performance under pressure (Low et al., 2021).
Has MindFit® proven its training transfers to real life?
Not with a controlled trial, and we won’t claim one. We’ve run a 12-week pilot with 30 people where average test scores rose 8.2 points and most reported better coping, but that’s self-reported and uncontrolled, so treat it as an early signal. The stronger evidence is for the method itself: training under pressure has been shown to improve performance under pressure in controlled studies (Low et al., 2021).
Are brain games a waste of time?
Not if you enjoy them. They’re fun and they build the skills they train. The problem is only the promise that they make you sharper at life.
Sources
Simons, D.J., Boot, W.R., Charness, N., Gathercole, S.E., Chabris, C.F., Hambrick, D.Z., & Stine-Morrow, E.A.L. (2016). Do “brain-training” programs work? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17(3), 103–186. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100616661983
Melby-Lervåg, M., Redick, T.S., & Hulme, C. (2016). Working memory training does not improve performance on measures of intelligence or other measures of “far transfer”: evidence from a meta-analytic review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(4), 512–534.
Low, W.R., Sandercock, G.R.H., Freeman, P., Winter, M.E., Butt, J., & Maynard, I. (2021). Pressure training for performance domains: a meta-analysis. Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology. https://shura.shu.ac.uk/25578/
Meichenbaum, D.H., & Deffenbacher, J.L. (1988). Stress inoculation training. The Counseling Psychologist, 16(1), 69–90. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011000088161005
Federal Trade Commission (2016). Lumosity to pay $2 million to settle FTC deceptive advertising charges for its “brain training” program. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2016/01/lumosity-pay-2-million-settle-ftc-deceptive-advertising-charges-its-brain-training-program