A variety of online games have emerged in recent years aimed at making people smarter. Fans will be disappointed to learn they don’t work.
According to the journal Nature, a study was financed by the BBC show Bang Goes the Theory to look into whether people who play online games get smarter. The study found that people who played these games don’t show any marked increase in intelligence.
8,600 people participated in the British research. They had to play an online game for at least 10 minutes, three times a week for six weeks. These games were designed to improve memory, reasoning and other brain abilities.
Then they compared the results with those of 2,700 people who just browsed the Web and answered general questions. Before the study, both groups had been tested to measure their intelligence quotient (IQ). It turns out that people who play games did not fare any better.
Adrian Owen is a neuroscientist at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and Brian Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK and led the study. He said, "There were absolutely no transfer effects." Or, in plain English, participants were no smarter after playing the games.
He added that "if you’re expecting (these games) to improve your IQ, our data suggests this isn’t the case."
One of the surprising findings of this study was that people who simply surfed online had better results in certain portions of the test.