London Study Suggests Brainteasers Have No Effect On Making Brain Smarter

Who doesn't love a good brainteaser? A fun game that is fun to play and makes you smarter at the same time is a great way to pass the time while improving your mind. We've all played these type of games and have done brainteasers that we all thought were making us smarter, but a new study shows that these games may be nothing more than just, well, games.

A London study has shown that people who play games on the computer that are said to make you smarter don't make you any smarter. In fact, they don't do anything at all. Over 8,500 people from the ages of 18 to 60 took part in the study by playing online games that told them would increase their intelligence, memory, and other cognitive aspects of their brains. They were told to play these games for about 10 minutes a day and to do this for three weeks. These numbers were then contrasted with over 2,000 other test subjects who acted as a control group by not playing the games at all. This group just went on the Internet the same amount of time that the other group was playing the brain games. Each set of test subjects were given I.Q. tests before the study to see if their brains improved over time.

What the results showed was that the subjects that played the online games and brainteasers didn't perform any better on I.Q. tests compared to the control group that simply went online. Even in some areas of the test, the people who didn't play the games scored higher. This goes to show that brain games could really just be a waste of time if they don't in fact make you any smarter. However, just with any exercise regime, it would be interesting to see how brain teaser exercises effect the brain over a much longer period of time, as three weeks isn't usually a sufficient amount of time to see significant results from any exercise routine.