What Can Gaming Do for Our Intelligence?

People get plenty creative with their New Year’s resolutions, but few even dare to dream of becoming more intelligent.

We will promise to run a marathon, go sober for a month, start a side hustle, and learn Italian well enough to order wine with theatrical confidence. Yet “I’m going to raise my cognitive horsepower” feels like something only a delusional Silicon Valley biohacker or a Victorian moralist with an estate to spend away on idle daydreams would say out loud.

Most of the cynicism is well-deserved realism, and barring Kvaschev’s study actually being replicable, or you going off to do a philosophy degree and arguing your way into sharper thinking, it can feel like there is precious little we can do to move the needle.

That “needle” framing matters immensely, however. There is a stark difference between trying to rewrite your IQ score by brute force and trying to build effective intelligence. Effective intelligence is how well your mind performs in the environments you actually live in, and it rests on your attention under pressure, your working memory when the room gets loud, your decision-making when you are tired, and your learning speed when you find yourself behind.

That version of intelligence is far less romantic, sure, but it is far more trainable.

Better yet, we have known about neuroplasticity and how experience leaves fingerprints on the brain for decades (Draganski, 2004). And yet conventional wisdom still insists our brains are not that mouldable, at least not for the better. We accept plasticity when it explains a bad habit, yet we get suspicious when it implies we could get an upgrade instead.

Which brings us to the topic of games.

How gaming offers a solution to younger brains: The proof is in the gradient

Few pastimes have had a faster glow-up than gaming.

It went from being cast as a corruptor of youth to becoming one of the most dominant entertainment industries on the planet. The moral panic has not fully left the building, and to be fair, the compulsive loops and time sinkholes still deserve a wary eye cast upon them. But it also misses a more interesting question.

What happens when you put a human brain into a system built around constant feedback, escalating challenge, and rewards for persistence?

Some of the most fascinating evidence sits in the realm of ageing brains. A McGill-led clinical trial recently reported that after 10 weeks of training with the app BrainHQ, older adults showed improvements in cholinergic function, a key system tied to attention, memory, and learning, finding levels typical of someone about a decade younger (Attarha et al., 2025).

Moving the needle on this kind of brain health has not been easy with lifestyle advice alone, and pharmaceutical approaches in this territory are complicated and contested. So when a structured, game-like training protocol shows measurable biochemical changes, it should at least force a rethink about what “brain training” can mean when it is done seriously.

The first hint of what is happening under the hood comes from the study’s contrast between challenge types.

The reporting emphasized that casual gaming did not show the same impact, while training that was attention-demanding and progressively harder did. In other words, the results seemed to hang on a gradient of difficulty, not on the mere fact of being entertained by a screen.

That gradient idea is the quiet hero of most real learning. You do not get stronger by lifting the same weight forever. You get stronger by lifting what is slightly too heavy, repeatedly, with enough recovery to get back in the ring.

Games, at their best, do this by design.

And it is not the first time we have seen gaming connect to sharper performance. In a classic surgical training study, Rosser Jr. and colleagues found that surgeons with substantial video game experience performed better on keyhole surgery, including fewer errors and faster completion times, and that measured gaming skill predicted surgical performance in their sample (Rosser Jr. et al., 2007).

On the attention side, Bavelier and colleagues have reviewed and tested how action video game play relates to selective visual attention, including differences in how gamers recruit attentional control networks under higher demand, suggesting greater efficiency in filtering irrelevant information (Bavelier et al., 2012).

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Then there is the bigger picture. A 2023 meta-analysis took a “game factors” approach and concluded that video game-based cognitive interventions show a modest overall benefit on cognition, while also finding that the specific gameplay features matter more than genre labels (Smith et al., 2023).

So gaming can make our brains more effective—what next?

The takeaway from this literature is not to drop everything and join a League of Legends guild or to let World of Warcraft subsume your life.

It is the older lesson we keep re-learning the hard way. Be careful what you spend your time doing because it shapes you more than you think.

Now for the IQ question. If games can improve some components of performance, does that mean we can rack up more IQ points while we are at it?

This is where things get slippery. Transfer remains the central question, and the evidence base remains too slim to make firm statements either way. However, when it comes to effective intelligence and how much mileage we get out of our mental engines, it's clear that the right kind of gaming can be both preventative maintenance and a stimulant in its own right.

And you want to gamify the lessons from the evidence base, start chasing the gradient everywhere in your life.

Find tasks that are slightly too hard, that give fast feedback, and that reward persistence without numbing you. Some games can do that. So can learning a language properly, writing weekly, playing an instrument, doing maths drills if you are brave, or, yes, studying philosophy if you like your workouts argumentative.

Just do not confuse comfort or ease with growth.