Does memory training work?

What the big studies found

The largest test of commercial-style brain training was Owen and colleagues' 2010 study in Nature: 11,430 people trained several times a week for six weeks. They improved substantially on the trained tasks and showed no meaningful transfer to untrained tasks, even closely related ones.

The famous counterpoint was Jaeggi's 2008 n-back study, which reported gains in fluid intelligence after working memory training. Follow-up attempts, including Redick's 2013 replication with an active control group, largely failed to reproduce the effect. A 2016 review by Simons and seven colleagues went through the whole industry's citations and concluded the evidence for real-world benefit was, in their word, inadequate.

Owen et al., 2010, Nature; Jaeggi et al., 2008, PNAS; Redick et al., 2013; Simons et al., 2016, Psychological Science in the Public Interest.

So why play at all?

Three honest reasons. First, within-task gains are real and satisfying: your digit span genuinely grows, your Stroop control genuinely sharpens, and those skills have direct uses. Chunking numbers is how people hold phone numbers and door codes; the tracking you build in Shell Shuffle is the same attention you use in traffic.

Second, a daily test is a measurement, and measurements are motivating. Watching your span move from 6 to 8 over two weeks is concrete in a way vague "brain health" promises never are.

Third, ten minutes of focused recall practice is ten minutes of practiced attention, and attention is the input to every memory strategy that does work.

What actually moves the needle

If your goal is remembering more in daily life, the strongest tools are strategies and habits, not games: spaced repetition, mnemonic techniques like the method of loci, sleep, and exercise. We cover them with sources in how to improve your memory.

Our position

Memtry is a set of honest measurements dressed as games. We tell you what each one trains, we never claim IQ gains, and everything stays free. If a two-week streak leaves you sharper on the tests and a little prouder of your attention span, that is the honest win on offer.