Comment by xyzzy123

I agree that if you want to get better at specific things you should just do those things.

Usually when you "learn" something you improve your understanding of the domain, you start chunking things up into patterns and structures. This reduces your mental load and lets you use your "working memory" more effectively.

I think the intuition with say, "n-back" is that there's supposed to be no structure beyond the memory task, so any increase in performance _must_ be an improvement in some sort of generalised "working memory".

As I understand it people have shown that there is "transferance" between these various types of working-memory based brain games (i.e, getting good at one can improve your performance on others that you haven't done before). But no one has shown that getting good at (say) dual n-back produces a strong improvement in "real tasks" that aren't just memory games.