Can You Actually Get “Smarter”? What Research Says

Direct answer: Yes, but selectively. Neuroplasticity is real: aerobic exercise, sustained skill learning, and cognitive engagement produce genuine, measurable gains in specific domains. But commercially marketed brain-training games show little to no transfer to general intelligence or everyday cognitive performance, one of psychology’s most consistently replicated null findings.

What Neuroplasticity Actually Supports

Neuroplasticity, the brain’s capacity to form new synaptic connections and reorganize itself in response to experience, is real and well-documented at every age, not just in childhood. The strongest evidence comes from aerobic exercise research. Systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials in older adults link sustained aerobic training to measurable gains in executive function and memory, along with structural changes such as increased hippocampal volume. These are not one-off findings from a single lab; they show up repeatedly across independent trials, which is exactly the kind of consistency that makes a claim trustworthy.

Sustained, effortful engagement with a specific skill, whether that’s a musical instrument, a new language, or structured exercise, reliably produces domain-specific improvement. A child who spends years practicing violin develops sharper auditory discrimination and finer motor control in the hands. An adult who takes up a new language strengthens working memory circuits tied to that language. The gains are real, but they cluster around the skill being practiced. A violinist’s improved auditory processing does not automatically make her better at algebra, and a new language learner’s stronger working memory does not automatically translate into faster reasoning on an unrelated puzzle.

This distinction matters because it’s exactly where popular understanding tends to run ahead of the evidence. What the research does not support is the leap from “the brain can change” to “any brain exercise makes you generally smarter.” Plasticity is real, but it is narrow and effortful, not a shortcut to broad intelligence gains. For families thinking about how to support a child’s cognitive development, the practical implication is straightforward: the most evidence-backed investments are ordinary, unglamorous ones (regular physical activity, consistent sleep, sustained practice at a real skill) rather than a specific branded product promising to build “the brain” in some generalized sense.

The Brain-Training Null Finding

This is one of the most robust null results in cognitive psychology, and it’s worth stating plainly rather than hedging around it. A 2016 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, led by Daniel Simons and six co-authors, examined the full evidence base behind commercial brain-training programs. The pattern the review found was consistent: people reliably get better at the trained task itself, show weaker gains on closely related tasks, and show little to no improvement on general intelligence tests or everyday cognitive performance. In plain terms, practicing a memory-matching game makes a person better at that memory-matching game. It does not reliably make that person better at remembering where they parked the car or doing well on an unrelated cognitive test.

This wasn’t just an academic finding that stayed inside journals. It played out in a real regulatory case. In January 2016, the Federal Trade Commission fined Lumos Labs, the maker of Lumosity, two million dollars for deceptive advertising. The specific problem was that the company could not substantiate claims that its games would delay memory decline, protect against Alzheimer’s disease, or improve performance at school or work. Those are exactly the kinds of broad, real-world claims that brain-training marketing has traditionally leaned on, and a federal regulator concluded the evidence behind them wasn’t there.

For a parent evaluating whether a subscription app is worth the money, the honest takeaway is narrow but useful: a brain-training app will very likely make a child better at that specific app, and that improvement is unlikely to generalize into better grades, sharper attention in class, or a higher IQ score. That doesn’t mean the games are worthless as entertainment or as light practice for a specific skill, only that the sweeping claims attached to their marketing have not held up under independent review.

Growth Mindset: A Real Effect, Widely Oversold

Growth mindset, the idea that believing intelligence is developable improves learning outcomes, is a genuine research finding, but its popularized version has outrun the data. A 2018 meta-analysis in Psychological Science by Victoria Sisk and colleagues pooled 273 studies, covering more than 365,000 students, on the relationship between mindset and achievement, plus 43 randomized intervention studies covering more than 57,000 students. Pooling this much data is what makes the finding worth taking seriously; it isn’t one small study, it’s a synthesis of a large and varied body of prior work.

The overall correlation between mindset and achievement across those studies was weak, and the average effect of mindset interventions on academic achievement was small, on the order of what researchers would describe as a small effect size (d = 0.08). In practical classroom terms, an effect that size would nudge an average student from roughly the 50th percentile to somewhere around the 53rd percentile. That is a real, measurable movement, but it is far short of the transformative framing that “growth mindset” often receives in popular articles and school assemblies.

The meta-analysis did find that effects were somewhat larger for academically at-risk or low-income students, which suggests the benefit is targeted rather than universal. A struggling student in a difficult academic or economic situation may get more out of a mindset intervention than an already high-achieving student gets. The honest version of this finding, then, is that mindset matters at the margins for some students, particularly those facing real barriers, rather than functioning as a general-purpose intelligence booster that every student should expect to benefit from equally. For a family deciding where to spend limited time and attention, this suggests mindset framing is worth pairing with concrete support (tutoring, sleep, structured practice) rather than treated as a stand-alone fix.

Verified neuroplasticity and cognitive-training claims against these sources on 2026-07-31: Simons et al., “Do ‘Brain-Training’ Programs Work?”, Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 2016 (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1529100616661983), which supports the finding that commercial brain-training programs show near transfer to trained tasks but little to no far transfer to general intelligence or everyday cognitive performance. The FTC’s press release on the Lumosity settlement, “Lumosity to Pay $2 Million to Settle FTC Deceptive Advertising Charges,” January 2016 (https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2016/01/lumosity-pay-2-million-settle-ftc-deceptive-advertising-charges-its-brain-training-program), provides real-world regulatory corroboration that a major brain-training company could not substantiate claims of improved school or work performance or delayed cognitive decline. Sisk, Burgoyne, Sun, Butler, and Macnamara, “To What Extent and Under Which Circumstances Are Growth Mind-Sets Important to Academic Achievement? Two Meta-Analyses,” Psychological Science, 2018 (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797617739704), shows growth mindset’s average effect on academic achievement is small (d = 0.08) and moderated by socioeconomic status and at-risk status, contradicting the popularized broad-benefit claim. “Effects of Exercise on Cognitive Performance in Older Adults,” a narrative review from PMC/the National Institutes of Health (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7244966/), provides genuine, positive neuroplasticity evidence linking aerobic exercise to measurable gains in executive function, memory, and hippocampal volume in older adults.