Research

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. When you play the tests at Cambridge Brain Sciences, you can be confident that they have not been sorted into arbitrary categories that only sound good; your score corresponds to what is physically happening right between your ears!

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.

Cambridge Brain Sciences continues to follow the evidence. 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. Use Cambridge Brain Sciences to track lifestyle in a daily journal, and our proprietary advanced analytics will help you identify actions that are proven to optimize cognition.

And because our tests are accurate measures of overall performance, they can be used to measure the results of brain training. Individuals and researchers alike can experiment with new methods of boosting their brain power. If new training methods prove to be effective, Cambridge Brain Sciences will be there to verify they work for you.