It's not intelligence testing—the structure of cognition reveals flaws in the concept of IQ
In our groundbreaking study, published in Neuron, almost 45,000 people took the Cambridge Brain Sciences tests, leading to an important discovery: intelligence is not just one thing. There are at least three independent intellectual domains: reasoning, short-term memory, and verbal ability. What’s more, each domain has its own brain network behind it.
It's not brain training—a massive study found no evidence that your brain can be worked out like a muscle
We used the Cambridge Brain Sciences tests to examine the effects of commercial training on cognitive performance. It would be great if playing tests could increase the overall performance of your cognition, but it turns out to be more complicated than that. For healthy people, practice usually only makes them better at what they practice. That's what results published in Nature revealed: doing tasks similar to current commercial brain training had no overall boost to cognition.
Future methods may reveal better ways to train the brain, but for now, decades of research have shown that lifestyle choices definitely can. For example, finding the right sleep schedule, exercising, and managing stress can all have short-term and long-term impact on your brain’s health, which underlies cognitive performance. And because our tests provide accurate and reliable measures the key elements of cognition, they can be used to measure the results of brain training—or many other brain health interventions.