14 DAY TRIAL // Researchers writing in a recent issue of the journal Psychological Science explain that, according to their investigations, people who use various games, apps and websites to train their brain experience a noteworthy improvement in their ability to remember various things.
As psychologists put it, their working memory capacity, i.e. the ability to retain information and access it fairly quickly even in the presence of distractions, gets a boost.
However, none of these brain training methods appears to help with an ability known as general fluid intelligence.
More precisely, they do not make it easier for people to use complex reasoning in order to make head and tail of or maybe even solve various problems.
Some might say that, since working memory capacity and general fluid intelligence appear to be strongly correlated, it could happen that, by training the first, one might experience an improvement in the latter.
Professor Randall Engle of Georgia Institute of Technology disagrees, and says that the people who make such claims most likely work on the assumption that “the two constructs are the same thing, or that WMC [working memory capacity] is the basis for fluid intelligence.”
He stresses that this is not the case.
“Height and weight in human beings are also strongly correlated but few reasonable people would assume that height and weight are the same variable,” he argues, as cited by EurekAlert.
Furthermore, “If they were, gaining weight would make you taller and losing weight would make you shorter — those of us who gain and lose weight periodically can attest to the fact that that is not true.”