Chances are good that if you’re reading this magazine, you don’t just want athletic excellence but also care about making smart decisions and holding intelligent conversations. Even if you don’t want to spend your evenings debating the intricacies of classic literature (or whatnot), I’m sure you at least want to be able to remember what you left the room to go do and what you were planning on picking up at the store on your way home from the gym—even if you have to walk through a doorway or two in the process.

For me the appeal has always been in improving my memory (punctuated by embarrassing instances of running into people who clearly knew me despite the fact that I had no idea who they were or where I knew them from). A secondary goal has been trying to multitask better (or remember what I was looking for online before I found myself with seven open windows in my browser).

The first time I’d heard that you could play computer games to improve cognitive function was actually on Twitter. I’d read that a certain game increases memory and attentiveness. Ironically, I can’t even remember the name of the game, only that it was incredibly boring and slow. I quickly decided that any gains would definitely not be worth it.

Bring on the games

That was years ago, though, and since then, various makers have stepped up their games (no pun intended) and created engaging (dare I say fun?) alternatives, with Cogmed, Jungle Memory and CogniFit among them. When I heard ads over and over again on the radio for Lumosity—an online brain training and neuroscience research company—I eventually downloaded the free version and plopped down $79.95 for a yearly subscription soon thereafter.

Launched in 2007, Lumosity (also known as Lumos Labs) claims that its series of games are based on neuroscience. Games are divided into various categories: speed, memory, attention, flexibility and problem solving.

One game, Lost in Migration, focuses on “attention.” You basically hit an arrow on your keyboard (or swipe your phone if you’re playing on it) in the direction where a middle bird in a flock is flying. The game is designed to help you avoid distractions and increase work productivity. Speed pack has you figure out where to pack an item in a suitcase so that it won’t overlap another object when closed. It’s a “speed” game designed to help you picture spatial arrangements and organize more efficiently. There are several games for “flexibility”—the ability to multitask and refocus your attention through various tasks—like being able to tell whether a combination of a number and a letter includes an even number (if on top) or a vowel (if on the bottom) without getting mixed up between the two. Memory games are pretty self-explanatory, and problem-solving games (my favorite!) involve basic math (but under pressure). Each game increases (or decreases) in difficulty according to performance. Subscribers can play more games per day and additional games (there are a total of 46), as well as comparing their scores to others in their age group.

What do these numbers mean?

So we can pay money to spend a few minutes a day playing online games, and it’s a bit addictive to hit new brain PRs. But I found myself wondering about their age group percentiles. You see, you can click on a “brain profile,” and it’ll give you a “Brain Performance Index” (or BPI) based on your top game scores in each area and compare them to others in your age group. My BPI doubled in less than 40 days of playing, and I really don’t think I’ve gotten any smarter. I haven’t noticed an increase in attentiveness or memory or multi-tasking, despite improving in the games.

Which brings me to a question about the percentiles. Now, I used to teach middle school and know about percentile scores. They’ll analyze scores against others in your age group. But the thing about them is that the standardized tests (the same for each grade in each school district in an entire state) are literally locked in a vault so that nobody can see them before D-day. Teachers have to count them and sign off on them and are not allowed to speak, other than reading the instructions on these tests. So you’re really comparing someone’s ability versus that of their peers on something none of them have ever seen before. And nobody knows how the tests will be constructed exactly. Some problems are similar to ones students have been studying and knew would be on the test, but there are word problems (for example) in each subject that nobody taking the test has ever seen before.

This, to me, seems qualitatively different than comparing someone’s score in a game they’ve never played against someone else their age who may have played that same game thousands of times. Because obviously if you play a game more often, you get better at it. But will that actually transfer over to attention, speed, problem solving, flexibility and memory in everyday life? And how does it compare to, say, playing Sudoku or chess or Go, or even other computer games designed to improve, say, memory? And then there’s the age brackets—I’m on the cusp at the moment but in two short months, I’ll watch my percentile points rise 9.4 points. (Hardy points out that speed and processing type tasks tend to peak out very early in life, around 20 or 25, but tasks involving more memory and complex reasoning, or related to vocabulary and words, peak out much later—in the 40s and 50s.)

Will it transfer?

There are brain tests you can take as a baseline before and after a period of time doing Lumosity training (they recommend 10 weeks with three to five “workouts” a week)—but again, the question still stands. Are you actually getting better at these things in a way that will transfer to the rest of your life or not?

“In general, there’s not a very straightforward way to know for sure that there’s transfer in your own individual experience, but there is a lot of research out there being done on the topic, and most of the research in the fields of cognitive training and neuroplasticity show that there’s transfer,” said Dr. Joe Hardy, Lumos Labs’ vice president of research and development. “There are literally dozens of papers showing that training in one task can transfer to another. Sure, it doesn’t always happen, but that’s why it’s important to do a variety of exercises,” he added.

However, there are also studies that indicate otherwise. “Although performance on tests of Gf (fluid intelligence) can be improved through direct practice on the tests themselves, there is no evidence that training on any other regimen yields increased Gf in adults. Furthermore, there is a long history of research into cognitive training showing that, although performance on trained tasks can increase dramatically, transfer of this learning to other tasks remains poor,” reads the abstract for research published in PNAS in 2008 (though, of course, there is always debate). A 2010 study published in Nature looked at over 11,000 participants who trained in various cognitive tasks designed to improve memory, reasoning, attention and other cognitive skills. “Although improvements were observed in every one of the cognitive tasks that were trained, no evidence was found for transfer effects to untrained tasks, even when those tasks were cognitively closely related,” the abstract reads.

Articles stating that the games don’t transfer are usually followed by a slew of comments from happy customers of the program detailing their own positive experiences. Some point out that several studies don’t necessarily transfer to other brain games they didn’t look at. And it’s not like the games are created randomly. “All of our exercises are based in core tasks that have been shown in the literature or known from very different neuroscience viewpoints to target different capacities,” Hardy explained. The tasks are based in scenarios that psychologists or neuroscientists set up to assess different abilities, and then turn them into engaging games designed to develop those specific areas.

But are there other ways to improve neuroplasticity that are, perhaps, either more enjoyable or more relevant to one’s interests (or profession)? After all, research shows that even some types of exercise can make you smarter, at least in rats… heck, even driving a taxi in London can change your brain. And brain training programs have been suspected by some researchers to be no more effective than doing crossword puzzles or surfing the internet. (Read more about this here). Since your brain creates new neural pathways (or reorganizes existing ones) whenever it’s stimulated, why the need for online games?

“The fact of the matter is that every day, every time you learn anything your brain is changing, neuroplasticity is something that happens all the time,” Hardy said. The flexibility that your brain has—the fact that it’s not a static organ (and that you’re not simply born with a certain set of skills and abilities that are all you’re ever going to have), he points out, is a philosophical debate that’s gone back thousands of years (John Locke and Immanuel Kant come to mind).

The research on brain training in general and Lumosity specifically is extensive. A brief glance showed that it’s been effective in small groups of people who had quick losses of cognitive ability due to illness (or side effects of treatment). For example, the study was very small (only 41 participants), but 12 weeks of brain training improved executive functions in breast cancer survivors who had undergone chemotherapy. Some improvement in cognitive ability was found in children with a history of cancer, despite the fact that cognitive function usually declines. Lumosity helped children with Turner syndrome (again, within a very small sample side) who were at risk of math difficulty and altered development of math-related brain networks. Small groups of older adults with mild cognitive impairment improved in visual sustained attention (but their everyday memory functioning or mood, as self-reported, did not improve).

I asked Dr. Hardy whether playing Lumosity games can help head off diseases such as Alzheimer’s, or the dramatic cognitive declines that become more noticeable for people in their 40s or 50s, but he said they don’t have enough data to know for sure since it happens over two to three decades.

So what’s the bottom line? The jury’s still out on that one—we’re not unfamiliar with conflicting studies. At the moment, it looks like physical activity may very well be the best way to slow the brain’s aging process (so we’re already one step ahead of the game). But staying mentally agile certainly can’t hurt—though playing brain games online is just one way to do that. It is a quick and easy one, though—so if you find it enjoyable, why not?