DO BRAIN GAMES ACTUALLY WORK?
This site is a site of brain games, so treat what follows with the appropriate suspicion. But the honest answer is more interesting than the marketing one, and the marketing one has already been to court.
THE SHORT VERSION
Practising a task makes you better at that task. It makes you a bit better at tasks that closely resemble it. There is not good evidence that it makes you generally smarter, better at your job, or protected from cognitive decline.
Researchers call the first of these near transfer and the second far transfer. Near transfer is real and reasonably well established. Far transfer is the thing the industry sold, and it's the thing that keeps failing to show up.
WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED
In 2014 a group of around seventy scientists published an open letter through the Stanford Center on Longevity and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, saying there was no compelling evidence that brain games improve general cognitive ability or stave off decline. A larger group of other researchers published a rebuttal pointing at studies they thought did show effects. Both letters are still online, and the disagreement was never cleanly resolved.
What did get resolved was the advertising. In 2016 the US Federal Trade Commission settled with Lumosity for $2 million over claims that its games improved performance at work and school and reduced the risk of Alzheimer's. The FTC's position was blunt: the company had simply not substantiated any of it.
That settlement is the clearest single fact in this area. Not "the science is unclear" — a regulator looked at the evidence behind the strongest version of the claim and found there wasn't any.
SO WHAT IS THE EFFECT?
Narrower than advertised and not nothing.
- You get faster at the specific thing. Not in dispute. Someone who has played a lot of a number game recognises number patterns faster. That's just practice, and practice works.
- Closely related tasks improve somewhat. A game built on pairs that make ten does seem to help with arithmetic involving pairs that make ten, because it's substantially the same operation.
- General reasoning, memory and attention mostly don't move. This is where study after study lands. The trained task improves, the untrained ones sit still.
The one partial exception often cited is the ACTIVE trial, a large long-running study in older adults, where a speed-of-processing training arm showed effects that persisted for years. Even there the gains were largely confined to the trained ability and measures close to it. It's a real result and it is not "games make you smarter".
WHY THE PROMISE IS SO APPEALING ANYWAY
Because getting better at the game feels like getting smarter. Your score climbs steadily and visibly. That feeling is honest evidence of one thing — you have learned the game — and it's a terrible guide to anything else, because there's no equivalent scoreboard for your general thinking to compare it against.
Add the fact that improvement is measured by the same task you trained on, and you have a setup that produces encouraging numbers almost regardless of whether anything transferred.
WHAT THIS SITE CLAIMS
Only the narrow thing. Make10 gives you a few hundred repetitions of finding pairs that add to ten, in a form you'll keep doing because you're chasing a score. If those pairs weren't automatic before, they will be after — and that's genuinely useful, because most mental addition shortcuts depend on them.
Food Rescue makes you decide, repeatedly, whether a piece of food is still good or is waste, and steer accordingly. What you'll retain from that is the sorting knowledge itself — which is less obvious than it sounds — not faster thinking in general.
Neither will make you sharper in any broad sense. They're pleasant ways to spend ten minutes that happen to rehearse something concrete, which is a lower claim than the category usually makes and the only one worth standing behind.
IF YOU WANT THE THING THAT DOES WORK
The uncomfortable finding running through this literature is that the interventions with the best evidence for general cognitive health aren't games at all. Aerobic exercise, sleep, treated hearing loss, education and social contact all have stronger support than any brain-training product.
None of that is a reason not to play a puzzle game. It's a reason not to play one instead of going for a walk.