Brain Training - Does it Work?

Nowadays you get overrun by IQ and brain training websites and games. Of course this is a lucrative business since everybody, young or old, male or female, black or white wants to be smart. Brain training is supposed to make you smarter and above all is fun! But is this really the case? The fun part of course is a pure personal opinion however does brain training actually make you smarter?

At first we should take into account that your IQ is generally accepted as a measure of your intelligence, "how smart you are" so to say. If you would do several IQ-tests your IQ will always be more or less the same. At least this is how it should work, however an increase or decrease in IQ of as high as 20 points during a lifetime is not completely uncommon even without taking aging diseases e.g. Alzheimer into account. So this means you can be either more or less intelligent during certain periods of your life.

A lot of research to this subject has been done and one of the most interesting experiments was carried out for the first time in the 1950s, by the Canadian psychologist Professor Donald Hebb and it was repeated again in 2008 by Professor Ian Robbins. In this experiment several volunteers were left alone in the dark in solitary confinement for 48 hours. This already proved to be enough to decrease some volunteers IQ-test outcomes by more than 20 points, showing the subjects brain is adjusting to the situation. Simply put: "They don't use their brain so it starts deteriorating". Of course this is an extreme example since the subjects were completely deprived of sensory stimulation, but the fact that the subjects regained their "intelligence" after a while in the real world is very interesting. This shows that by stimulating the brain the subjects actually got smarter again.

This makes you wonder: "What if you have a dull job which does not stimulate your brain at all? Would your brain adjust to this situation too? Would you actually get dumber since you are not using your brain for 8 or more hours a day?" Research to these effects is way more complicated because of the large scale at which experiments will have to be performed to get trustworthy results. However looking at the results of the sensory deprivation experiments one would come to the logical conclusion that you have to train your brain to keep it in shape. This is what goes for your entire body e.g. muscles, organs, so why would your brain be any different?