Definition
Brain training refers to any regime of structured cognitive practice — computerised tasks, working-memory drills, or attention exercises — intended to improve mental abilities such as memory, processing speed, reasoning, or focus.
The concept rests on neuroplasticity: the brain's lifelong capacity to reorganise neural pathways in response to experience. The commercial promise is strong transfer — that improving performance on a training task will generalise to real-world cognition. The scientific evidence, however, draws a sharp distinction between near transfer (improvement on tasks closely resembling the training) and far transfer (improvement on unrelated, ecologically valid outcomes). Far transfer is rare and contested.
Why it matters
How it works
The transfer problem
The central critique of commercial brain-training products (articulated in a landmark 2014 statement signed by 75 neuroscientists) is that task-specific practice produces task-specific improvement. Working-memory training that boosts digit-span scores does not reliably increase academic performance, workplace problem-solving, or attention in daily life. The brain learns precisely what it practises, and the generalisation jump is large and often uncrossed.
Where training does generalise
Two categories of training show broader effects. First, dual-task or adaptive n-back training shows some evidence of improving working memory in ways that weakly transfer to fluid reasoning — though the effect size is modest (around 0.2–0.4 SD) and the long-term durability is uncertain. Second, mindfulness and attention training generalise more widely, likely because they train the regulatory process (noticing, redirecting, sustaining) rather than a particular content domain. Amishi Jha's research shows mindfulness training improves attentional blink and sustained vigilance — outcomes with clear real-world relevance.
Deliberate practice as the gold standard
Anders Ericsson's research on expertise shows that the most powerful form of 'brain training' is deliberate practice within a specific domain: chess, surgery, music, mathematics. Deliberate practice builds domain-relevant mental representations — what Ericsson calls 'mental representations' — that support superior performance. Unlike generic cognitive games, deliberate practice produces expert knowledge structures that transfer within the domain and, to some degree, to adjacent domains.