8 best brain training apps

Training your brain doesn’t have to be hard and it doesn’t have to be a chore. There is an extensive range of brain training apps available to help you improve your memory, challenge your brain and fight off the effects of ageing. These apps can be downloaded straight to your smartphone or tablet, allowing you to train your brain whenever and wherever you want. And best of all, they make the brain training process a whole lot of fun.

Let’s take a look (in no particular order) at the 8 of the top brain training apps and the benefits they can offer you.

1. Lumosity
   Free in the iOS Store and Android Play Store, Lumosity offers an ever-expanding set of cognitive and scientific games designed to improve your working memory and stimulate your brain on a daily basis. Part of what these games are designed to do is strengthen your ability to pay attention to the right things — that is, the things that help you solve the task at hand — while learning to ignore things that don’t help. Lumosity is one of the most popular brain-training games out there, used by more than 60 million people worldwide.

2. Peak
   This free app provides more than 40 fun games to help you exercise your brain. Peak is designed to improve your memory, sharpen your problem-solving skills and develop your mental agility. Each game has been developed by neuroscientists and the Coach feature offers in-depth insights to help you track your progress. Peak is available on Android and iOS devices.

3. Elevate
   Elevate is a strong rival to Peak: it has similarly clear visuals and simple, accessible mini-games to test your wits against. There are more than 30 here testing memory, focus, maths, comprehension and other mental skills.
   The app is keen to get you logging in regularly, tracking your “streaks” on its calendar, and tweaking the difficulty levels as you become more adept. Here too, a Pro subscription (for £5.99 a month) unlocks more games, and lets you play them as often as you like.

4. Fit Brains Trainer
   This award-winning brain games app is designed to challenge both your cognitive and emotional intelligence. Fit Brains Trainer offers more than 60 games and over 500 workout sessions to target the six major areas of the brain: memory, speed of thinking, concentration, problem solving, language and visual-spatial. In-depth performance reports are also included so you can identify where you need to improve. Available on Android and iOS devices.

5. Dakim
   Self-described as a “brain fitness program,” Dakim offers users a set of games and puzzles designed to help you give your brain a comprehensive workout. The program gives you access to more than 100 individual brain exercises, all designed to improve attention and concentration — in other words, the very kind of mental tasks that have been demonstrated to play a role in preventing Alzheimer’s and related symptoms.

6. CogniFit Brain Fitness
   CogniFit offers 25 brain games to train more than 20 cognitive skills. Though it might seem like the focus is on fun when playing this app, the games are designed to assess and improve key cognitive abilities such as memory, concentration and attention. CogniFit Brain Fitness is available for Android and iOS.

7. Memorado
   Memorado is a fun brain training app full of games designed to improve your memory, concentration and logic. There are 24 mind games over 720 levels, with personalised daily workouts tailored to your wants and needs. In a unique twist, Memorado also includes four soothing “Mindfulness” exercises to help reduce stress. Available for iOS and Android.

8. Eidetic
   Eidetic’s tagline is both broad and specific: “Learn and remember anything.” Scientific studies of the way the brain learns have demonstrated unequivocally that repetition is key to getting a new piece of information to be designated for long-term storage in your memory. By employing a technique called “spaced repetition,” the Eidetic app helps you learn and remember all manner of interesting words and facts. It’s available as an iOS App for iPhones and iPads.