HOW CAN I BOOST MY IQ?

If you're serious about getting smarter, it's time to ditch the brain-training apps

- TOM HOWARTH

Most of us, whether we admit it or not, would probably like to be a little smarter.

After all, who wouldn’t want to be a chess whizz, or at the heart of the cut and thrust in every dinner party debate?

But beyond being born with the right genetics and into an environment that fosters learning from an early age, you might wonder whether boosting your brain’s performance is even possible. And if so, how?

Brain-training games claim to be one such way. Much like how people who want bigger muscles head to the gym, people who want to pump up their intellect turn to brain-training games.

They've become increasingly popular in recent years, partly because apps and smartphones have put them within easy reach at all times, but also because the idea behind them is simple and compelling: play this fun game for a few minutes a day and it'll make you smarter.

Sadly, the evidence base for the efficacy of brain-training games is shaky at best. A major study published in 2018 put them to the test by training participants on a simple game that involved tracking a token as it moved behind a set of squares. With practice, people got much better at the task.

Yet when they were tested on a similar challenge – remembering a short string of numbers – those gains vanished. The training didn’t transfer from the game to the task.

Other research backs up Stojanoski’s findings, but it’s not the first time the purported benefits of such games have been called into question – in 2016, the US Federal Trade Commission even fined Lumosity, a leading brain-training company, $2m (£1.5m) after ruling that its claims about boosting everyday performance and preventing cognitive decline were deceptive.

One of those avenues, by a remarkable coincidence, might be lifting weights for real.

BRAIN POWER