Brain-training will make you smarter

You get better at exactly what you train. That might mean something different from what you think.

During the 2000s, several computer game makers claimed to make you smarter if you trained your brain with their games. By exercising with the games on a regular basis, you would be able to improve a wide range of cognitive abilities in real life. The training would benefit your memory, your speed of thinking, your scholastic results, and it would even benefit children with developmental cognitive disorders and help prevent or at least delay dementia and general mental decline in the elderly.

First a short sidestep about intelligence. Generally speaking, intelligence is divided into fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. Crystallized intelligence refers to your knowledge of facts, which grows over your lifetime. Fluid intelligence alludes to your ability to solve new problems, unrelated to your accumulated knowledge. What these brain-training games mostly aim for, is to grow your fluid intelligence. They do this with exercises created to target your so-called working memory. Basically, your working memory is what holds your current thoughts. It typically holds only about seven chunks of information and lasts only a few seconds. If you don’t repeat the chunks in your working memory…