When Brain Age appeared on the scene in 2005, it introduced millions of people to a provocative idea: What if you could train your brain?
Nintendo’s video game promised to help people “train your brain in minutes a day.” Millions of copies were sold. Competitors followed. Suddenly, “brain training” was everywhere.
But cognitive training wasn’t new.
Long before Brain Age became a consumer phenomenon, clinicians had been working one-on-one with people to strengthen or restore cognitive functions. Speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, psychologists, rehabilitation specialists and others had spent decades developing techniques to help people who struggled to learn, recover after injury or function more independently.
Even computer-assisted cognitive rehabilitation predated Brain Age. Video games were being used therapeutically in the late 1970s and personal computers and educational software in cognitive rehabilitation in the 1980s.
Most people simply didn’t know about it.
Brain Age changed that. It didn’t invent cognitive training. It brought the idea of training the brain into the public consciousness.
And that created an unexpected problem.
It Was Never One Thing
As consumer brain games proliferated, very different activities began to be discussed under the same broad labels: “brain training” or “cognitive training.”
A Nintendo game.
An exercise designed to practice working memory.
A cognitive rehabilitation program following a stroke.
A speech-language intervention.
A comprehensive program designed to strengthen multiple cognitive skills involved in learning.
They all involved the brain, but they were designed for different purposes, developed from different traditions and should never have been expected to produce the same outcomes.
Yet for much of the next 20 years, they were often discussed—and sometimes researched—as though they were variations of the same thing.
And so an enormous scientific and public debate grew around a deceptively simple question:
Does brain training work?
For years, the answer from many researchers was short and decisive: No. Or perhaps: It only helps people get better at the games they practice.
Some of that skepticism was well deserved.
Consumer brain-training products sometimes made expansive claims the evidence simply did not support. In many studies, people got better at the particular activities they practiced but showed little evidence that those gains would carry over to substantially different tasks or everyday functioning.
But the conclusion that sometimes followed—that cognitive training simply didn’t work—contained a fundamental category problem.
Asking whether cognitive training works is a little like asking whether exercise works.
Walking around the block. Training for a marathon. Physical therapy after surgery. Olympic weightlifting. Yoga.
They all involve physical activity. But they are designed for different purposes, use very different methods and produce different outcomes. We wouldn’t evaluate physical therapy by studying the results of walking around the block.
The same should be true of cognitive training.
Part of the confusion has been linguistic. “Brain games,” “brain training” and “cognitive training” are often used interchangeably, even though they can describe very different objectives.
One useful way to distinguish them is by asking what they are designed to accomplish.
Brain games stimulate. Brain training exercises. Cognitive training develops. Comprehensive, Integrated Cognitive Training (CICT®) develops the interconnected cognitive capacities that support learning and performance.
The objectives matter. A consumer brain-training program designed to help an adult exercise memory and attention for cognitive health is pursuing a different goal from an intervention designed to develop a child's cognitive capacity for learning.
And comprehensive integrated cognitive training adds another important distinction. In school and everyday life, cognitive skills rarely operate alone. Attention, working memory, processing, reasoning, inhibition, cognitive flexibility and other capacities continually interact. If meaningful transfer is the goal, how those skills are developed together matters.
Science Started Asking Better Questions
Over the last two decades, the scientific conversation has become considerably more sophisticated.
Adele Diamond, one of the world’s leading researchers on executive functions, and Daphne Ling reviewed a wide range of approaches intended to improve executive functions, including computerized cognitive training, school programs and physical activities.
Their conclusions are important precisely because they are nuanced.
Executive functions can be improved through training and practice. People improve the skills they practice, and those improvements can generalize to other contexts where those same skills are needed.
But Diamond and Ling make another observation that is especially important to understanding the cognitive-training debate: to see widespread benefits, diverse skills need to be practiced.
That makes intuitive sense when we consider how cognition actually operates outside the laboratory.
Very little that matters in school—or in life—depends upon one cognitive skill functioning by itself.
Reading comprehension, for example, requires a student to recognize and process words, focus attention, hold earlier information in working memory while integrating new information, retrieve relevant knowledge from long-term memory, inhibit irrelevant information and reason about meaning.
Solving a multistep math problem requires different academic knowledge, but again multiple cognitive processes must work together.
Driving a car, following a conversation, organizing a project and learning a new procedure are no different in this respect. Cognitive skills function as an integrated system.
That distinction matters when we talk about training.
If we repeatedly practice one cognitive skill in isolation, we may get better at performing tasks that rely heavily on that skill. But everyday functioning rarely asks that skill to operate alone.
Real life requires cognitive skills to work together.
That is why comprehensive integrated cognitive training (CICT®) represents a fundamentally different proposition from a brain game or an exercise that repeatedly practices one narrowly defined cognitive process.
The goal isn’t simply to make someone better at the training activities. It is to strengthen cognitive skills while requiring them to work in increasingly complex combinations—more like the way they must function in learning and everyday life.
And that brings us to the question that has always mattered most.
Does It Transfer?
If someone practices a memory exercise and gets better only at that exercise, the practical value is limited.
Parents don’t particularly care whether their child can score higher on a cognitive-training exercise. Educators don’t either.
They care whether the child can remember directions, comprehend what they read, solve problems, learn more independently and handle increasingly complex academic work.
In other words, the meaningful measure of cognitive training is transfer.
Diamond and Ling’s analysis helps clarify this issue. Improving a cognitive skill can generalize to other situations where that skill is required. The question, then, is whether training prepares cognitive skills to function effectively in the many different contexts in which we actually use them.
That question has particular significance in education because academic subjects that look very different on the surface share some of the same cognitive underpinnings.
Working memory isn’t a math skill.
Attention isn’t a reading skill.
Inhibitory control doesn’t belong to science class.
Cognitive flexibility isn’t something students use only during social studies.
Students draw on these and other cognitive capacities throughout the school day, in different combinations and under different demands.
A student doesn’t “transfer” working memory from mathematics to reading in the same way that she might transfer her understanding of fractions to a new kind of mathematics problem.
She uses working memory in both.
The National Research Council’s landmark How People Learn describes transfer—the ability to extend what has been learned in one context to new contexts—as a central concern of education. It also traces a long history of research into the conditions under which learning carries from one task or context to another.
That research offers an important caution: simply practicing something repeatedly does not guarantee broad transfer. Learning experiences that look equally successful when we measure only what was practiced can look quite different when we test whether the learning can be used elsewhere.
That is remarkably relevant to the cognitive-training debate.
The real test isn’t what happens in the training program.
It’s what happens when the learner closes the program and goes back to class.
We Can Measure That
This is where the cognitive-training conversation has changed significantly.
We don’t have to rely solely on whether someone improves on cognitive exercises. We can measure cognitive skills before and after training. And, critically, we can also look for changes beyond the training environment.
Do students read more effectively?
Does mathematics performance improve?
Can they manage more complex academic work?
Do teachers see greater independence and engagement?
Are improvements sustained?
Those are far more consequential questions than whether someone became better at a brain game.
Research on cognitive training continues to investigate what produces transfer, how broad that transfer can be and how durable the effects are. Those are legitimate and important scientific questions.
But evidence from comprehensive integrated cognitive training (CICT) has increasingly demonstrated what matters most to educators: gains need not remain confined to the training exercises themselves. Improvements in underlying cognitive skills can be accompanied by measurable improvements in academic performance and classroom functioning.
And that changes the question for education.
Education Has Traditionally Focused on the Other Side of the Equation
For generations, the primary tools available for improving student learning have focused on teaching.
Better curriculum.
Better instructional methods.
More effective academic interventions.
Differentiation.
Additional practice.
Accommodations.
Professional development.
That focus makes sense. Teaching is what schools do.
But it can also cause us to overlook the other side of the learning equation: the capacity of the learner to benefit from that teaching.
Rebecca Estes, a veteran educator and former senior leader at the Indiana Department of Education, captured the tension in reviewing our book, Your Child Learns Differently, Now What?
“As an educator for over 20 years, some of the beliefs outlined by Stark and Hill can initially be hard to hear; we want to believe that teachers hold the key to all learning, but the learner really holds that key. Learning IS what truly counts and teaching is only really important if learning is taking place.”
That isn’t an argument that teachers matter less.
It is an argument for distinguishing learning from teaching.
Teaching is what the educator does.
Learning is what happens within the learner.
Excellent instruction is essential. But even excellent instruction must be attended to, processed, understood, connected to prior knowledge, retained and ultimately applied by the student’s brain.
And students differ dramatically in the cognitive capacity they bring to those tasks.
Teachers See It Every Day
Two students can sit in the same classroom, hear the same explanation, work with the same materials and receive the same amount of instructional time—and learn very different amounts.
One remembers the three-step direction; another loses step two before beginning.
One reads a paragraph and integrates the ideas; another reaches the bottom and cannot remember enough of what came before to construct meaning.
One can shift strategies when the first approach to a problem fails; another keeps repeating the same unsuccessful approach.
One can ignore the conversation across the room; another cannot keep irrelevant information from competing for attention.
We often describe the consequences of these differences academically: poor comprehension, careless mistakes, difficulty with multistep math, incomplete assignments, inconsistent performance.
But beneath those academic symptoms can be differences in the cognitive systems students use to learn.
Working memory affects the ability to hold information in mind while doing something with it. Attention influences what information gets processed and what gets ignored. Inhibitory control helps students resist distractions and impulsive responses. Cognitive flexibility allows learners to change perspectives, rules and strategies as circumstances change.
These aren’t reading skills or math skills.
They are part of the cognitive infrastructure for learning.
What If We Work on Both Sides?
Historically, when cognitive weaknesses interfere with learning, schools have largely had to work around them.
We can simplify directions. Provide additional time. Reduce distractions. Repeat information. Break assignments into smaller steps. Supply organizational supports. Reteach material. Offer additional practice.
Those strategies can be valuable, and students who need them should receive them.
But notice what most of them have in common.
They change the demands surrounding the learner.
What if we can also strengthen some of the capacity the learner brings to those demands?
That is where the cognitive-training conversation becomes an education conversation.
The question isn’t whether schools should stop improving curriculum or instruction. Of course they shouldn’t.
It isn’t whether cognitive training should replace excellent teaching, academic intervention, necessary accommodations or appropriate student supports. It shouldn’t.
The opportunity is to work on both sides of the learning equation.
Improve what and how we teach.
And develop the cognitive capacity students use to learn.
The Conversation Education Needs to Have
Most teachers were never trained to think about cognitive capacity as something that could be systematically developed.
They were trained to teach reading, mathematics, science, history and other academic content. They learned instructional strategies, classroom management and assessment. Increasingly, they have learned sophisticated ways to differentiate instruction and accommodate individual differences.
What if the next step is not simply becoming better at accommodating differences in learning capacity, but recognizing that some of that capacity can itself be developed?
That is a very different educational proposition.
It means a student who struggles to hold information in working memory isn’t necessarily destined to have teachers compensate for that weakness throughout school.
It means cognitive differences can be something we measure and understand not simply to explain why students struggle, but to help determine what can be strengthened.
And it means that developing a student’s capacity to learn can become an intentional part of helping that student succeed.
Twenty years ago, the public conversation revolved around a deceptively simple question:
Does brain training work?
Twenty years of research have given us a much better set of questions: What are we training? How are we training it? Is the training sufficiently challenging and intensive? Are cognitive skills being trained in ways that allow them to function together? Do the gains transfer beyond the training environment? And are those gains sustained?
Those questions should continue to drive research and help educators distinguish serious cognitive training from products that merely provide mental exercise.
But the larger question for education has changed.
We know that cognitive capacity is more malleable than education has traditionally assumed.
Now we have to decide what to do with that knowledge.
For decades, we have invested enormous effort in improving what happens on the teaching side of the learning equation.
The opportunity before us is to bring the same intentionality to developing the learner.
The cognitive training debate brought us this far. The education conversation is finally beginning.
References and Further Reading
Diamond, A., & Ling, D. S. (2016). Conclusions about interventions, programs, and approaches for improving executive functions that appear justified and those that, despite much hype, do not. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 34–48.
Lynch, B. (2002). Historical review of computer-assisted cognitive retraining. Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation, 17(5), 446–457.
National Research Council. (2000). How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. Chapter 3: Learning and Transfer.
