A brain age test and what each version really reports

0 The short answer

A brain age is not one measurement but three different numbers that share a name: a game score relabeled as an age, a research model's prediction from an MRI scan, and a score compared with people of the same age. Only the third is what a psychologist's test reports, and the phrase "age of your brain" is literal only in the second, a research method that needs a scan. ACIS gives no brain age; it compares performance with adult norms for ages 16 to 90, from the Quick form at 15 dollars (about 45 minutes) to the Full Scale form at 50 dollars (about 175 minutes), prices read October 29, 2026, and a free trial needs no card. The decisive limit is that an online, unsupervised score that is not clinical describes performance on its tasks and cannot tell you whether your memory is healthy, which is a question for a doctor.

1 What does a brain age test report?

A brain age test reports one of three unrelated things depending on who built it, and the single phrase hides which one you are getting. A search for the phrase on October 29, 2026 returned mostly apps and short quizzes, which is a reason to be precise about what each kind of result is before comparing them.

The first meaning is a game score expressed as an age. A brain training game asks you to complete short exercises and then shows a number labeled as your brain age. The second meaning comes from neuroscience. Researchers train a statistical model on MRI scans of healthy people of known age, then ask the model to predict the age of a new scan. The difference between that predicted age and the person's actual age is called a brain age gap in the research literature. The third meaning is the one psychology uses without the label: a cognitive test compares your performance with the performance of people of your own age and reports a position, such as a scaled score, an index or a percentile. Nobody reports an age in that case. They report where you stand among your age peers.

The three share the word "age" and almost nothing else, as the table shows.

The rest of the page takes them in turn. The sections on games and on the Federal Trade Commission come first because they are what most searchers meet. The MRI section follows, because it is the only version in which an age is a literal output. The sections after that explain what a normed test reports in place of an age, compare the real options, and set out what an unsupervised online score can and cannot support.

2 How does a brain age game produce its number?

A brain age game turns a set of exercises into one number and labels it an age, but the product pages opened for this article do not say what that age is compared with. A well known example comes from Nintendo, whose Switch release is Dr Kawashima's Brain Training. On its Australian product page, read October 29, 2026, Nintendo asks "How old is your brain now?" and says you calculate an overall Brain Age Score by performing back to back exercises that challenge information processing speed, short term memory and self control. It also invites players to compare scores with friends and family.

That description tells you what the exercises sample. It does not tell you the reference group, the precision of the result, or how a raw performance is converted into an age. Those are the three things a test user needs before reading any score, and the page text read for this article states none of them. This is a statement about one product page on one date, not a finding that the conversion is arbitrary. It means a reader cannot check it from the publisher's page.

Lumosity, the brain training product discussed in the next section, publishes an account of how its own number works. Its help center article on how its performance index is calculated, updated July 27, 2026 and read on October 29, 2026, says the Lumosity Performance Index is a standardized metric of how well you perform on Lumosity games. The article says the index is not influenced by your age, and that it is based on score distributions for each game across a wide range of members. A second help article, on comparing yourself with other members (dated April 3, 2025), says paid members can see their percentile against other Lumosity players in their age bracket, that a birthdate is needed, and that the oldest comparison group is 75 and over. These pages are cited as market facts about how a product describes its scoring. They do not describe a brain age, and they are not evidence about intelligence.

The pattern is still instructive. In the Lumosity description the number itself ignores age, and age enters only in a later comparison with the product's own members. A comparison of that kind answers "how do I do relative to people who play this game", which is a different question from "how do I compare with adults of my age in general". The second question requires a reference sample that was drawn and described for that purpose, which is what the guide to how IQ scores are normed sets out.

Free brain age apps and quizzes are a category this page did not evaluate individually, and it does not rate them. What it offers is a set of questions that any of them should answer, the same questions that apply to every score: compared with whom, with what error, and with what evidence that the score means what the label says. The review of what each Human Benchmark game tests applies the same questions to a well known set of free browser games and reaches a similar conclusion about converting a game score into an IQ.

3 What did the FTC say about Lumosity in 2016?

On January 5, 2016, the Federal Trade Commission announced that Lumos Labs, the company behind Lumosity, would pay 2 million dollars to settle charges that it had deceptively advertised its brain training program, and the useful lesson is about the evidence behind claims, not about any score. The details below come from the Commission's press release, read October 29, 2026. Everything here is what the Commission stated. These are the FTC's allegations in a proposed settlement, and the release does not report any response from the company or say whether the defendants admitted or denied the allegations.

The release says the FTC's complaint describes the program as 40 games purportedly designed to target and train specific areas of the brain, and that the company advertised training for 10 to 15 minutes three or four times a week. It gives subscription options ranging from 14.95 dollars a month to a 299.95 dollar lifetime membership. The FTC alleges that the defendants, the company and two of its founders, claimed that training with Lumosity would improve performance on everyday tasks, in school, at work and in athletics, and would delay age related cognitive decline and protect against mild cognitive impairment, dementia and Alzheimer's disease. It also alleges claims that the games would reduce cognitive impairment associated with health conditions including stroke, traumatic brain injury, PTSD, ADHD, the side effects of chemotherapy and Turner syndrome. It alleges that the defendants claimed scientific studies proved these benefits, and that the company failed to disclose that some consumer testimonials on its website had been solicited through contests that promised significant prizes.

Jessica Rich, director of the Commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in the release that Lumosity "preyed on consumers' fears about age-related cognitive decline" and "simply did not have the science to back up its ads." Those are the Commission's words about the advertising claims in the case. The release does not discuss a brain age number, and the page read for this article does not contain the phrase.

The settlement terms, as stated, were these:

• Lumos Labs would pay 2 million dollars to the Commission.
• A judgment of 50 million dollars against the company would be suspended, due to its financial condition, after the company pays 2 million dollars to the Commission.
• The company would notify subscribers who signed up for an auto renewal plan between January 1, 2009 and December 31, 2014 about the action and give them a way to cancel.
• The company and the individual defendants would be required to have competent and reliable scientific evidence before making future claims about any benefits for real world performance, age related decline or other health conditions.
• The Commission voted 4 to 0 to authorize filing the complaint and the proposed stipulated order, which the FTC filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Three limits keep the case in proportion. It concerned advertising claims about training benefits, and it is not a ruling on whether a particular game score is accurate. It concerned one company, and it says nothing about other products. And it is one document, so the next section turns to the research literature on brain training.

4 Does playing brain training games work, and what did the BBC study find?

Brain training reliably improves performance on the tasks that are practiced, and the large studies find little evidence that the gains reach other abilities or everyday life, so a game's brain age is best read as a score on that game. Three sources carry most of the weight, and they differ in design, so each is described by what it did.

The broadest is a review by Simons and colleagues, published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest in 2016. It starts from two open letters published in 2014, one from more than 70 scientists saying brain games do not provide a scientifically grounded way to improve cognitive functioning or to stave off cognitive decline, and a reply from 133 scientists and practitioners saying the literature is replete with demonstrations of benefit. The authors set out best practices for training studies and then evaluated the published peer reviewed intervention studies that leading brain training companies cite on their websites, on the reasoning that these should be the best support for the claims. They found extensive evidence that training improves performance on the trained tasks, less evidence of improvement on closely related tasks, and little evidence that training enhances distantly related tasks or everyday cognitive performance. They also found that many of the studies had major shortcomings in design or analysis, and that none of the cited studies met all of the best practices they identify as essential for drawing clear conclusions about everyday benefits.

The second involved the BBC. Owen and colleagues reported in Nature in 2010 a six week online study of 11,430 participants, recruited among viewers of the BBC science program Bang Goes the Theory. After a baseline assessment of reasoning, verbal short term memory, spatial working memory and paired associates learning, participants were randomly assigned to one of two training groups or a control group. The training groups practiced six tasks on the BBC website for a minimum of 10 minutes a day, three times a week: one group on reasoning, planning and problem solving, the other on a broader mix that included short term memory, attention, visuospatial processing and mathematics. The control group answered obscure questions using any online resource. The authors report improvements in every one of the trained tasks and no evidence of transfer to untrained tasks, even when those tasks were cognitively closely related. This page does not claim that it is the only BBC material on the subject. The BBC's own site could not be opened with the tools used for this article, so nothing here describes a quiz hosted there.

The third is the only one of the three that used a Nintendo game: the paper says it used Brain Age, published by Nintendo in 2005 and played on a Nintendo DSi, not the Switch release described above. Nouchi and colleagues ran a randomized trial in PLoS ONE in 2012 in which 32 older volunteers were assigned to play either Brain Age or Tetris for about 15 minutes a day, at least five days a week, for four weeks. Fourteen of the 16 participants in each group finished. Cognitive function was measured before and after in four categories: global cognitive status, executive functions, attention and processing speed. The authors report that the effects of the Brain Age game transferred to executive functions and processing speed, and that it showed no transfer effect on global cognitive status or attention. They state that the results need replication in large samples and that long term effects and relevance for everyday functioning remain uncertain. The paper's competing interests statement says that one author is the creator of Brain Age and that the university where that author works has received royalties generated by the game's sales; the authors add that this does not alter their adherence to the journal's policies on sharing data and materials. The abstract does not report the game's own brain age number as an outcome, so the trial speaks to whether playing changes performance on separate tests, not to whether the number the game shows is valid.

Read together, the three sources point the same way. Practice changes what is practiced. Whether that spreads to other abilities is the contested part, and the strongest positive result here comes from a small trial that compared one game with another and whose authors include the game's creator. The page on what training can and cannot move in an IQ score takes that question further. For the narrower question of this page, the implication is simple: if playing more can change your game score, then the score is partly a record of practice, and a number that depends on practice cannot also be an age.

5 What does brain age mean in MRI research?

In neuroscience a brain age is a literal model output, a prediction of a person's age from the structure of the brain on a scan, and researchers care about the gap between that prediction and the person's real age more than about the predicted age itself. This is the one meaning in which the phrase "age of your brain" describes something computed from the brain, and it is a research method that needs scanner data and a trained model. It is not something an online test can reproduce.

The idea was worked out in studies such as Franke and colleagues in NeuroImage in 2010, who introduced a framework for estimating the age of healthy people from T1 weighted MRI scans. They tested it on over 650 healthy participants aged 19 to 86, collected from four scanners, and reported a correlation of 0.92 between estimated and real age and a mean absolute error of 5 years. Cole and Franke reviewed the field in Trends in Neurosciences in 2017, in a paper on innovative brain ageing biomarkers whose abstract presents evidence for neuroimaging based brain age as a biomarker and also discusses controversies around it.

A later review by Cole, Marioni, Harris and Deary in Molecular Psychiatry in 2019 gives the working definition and some numbers. The authors call the gap the brain predicted age difference, calculated as predicted brain age minus chronological age. In their illustration, a model fitted with Gaussian processes regression to 2,001 healthy individuals aged 18 to 90 had a mean absolute error of 4.93 years and a correlation of 0.94 under ten fold cross validation. Even in this illustration, then, the typical miss is about five years.

The same review shows why the gap interests researchers. In the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936, 669 people scanned at about age 73 (72 to 74) had a wide variability in brain predicted ages despite the narrow age range. The authors report that the gap was significantly related to a composite measure of cognitive function, with a standardized beta of negative 0.12, so that an older looking brain went with slightly lower scores. That is a statistically significant association, and numerically a small one. They also report that brain predicted age was reliable, with an intraclass correlation of 0.97 within a scanner and 0.92 between scanners, and they stress that models need validation in external datasets because good accuracy within the training sample is not enough. They describe clinically applicable models as a long term goal.

Three conclusions follow, and none of them is a test you can take at home.

• An MRI brain age is a statistical prediction with a typical error of about five years, so a single person's predicted age is a rough estimate.
• The authors of the 2019 review describe the development of clinically applicable models as a long term goal of the field.
• Its association with cognitive test performance is statistically significant but numerically small in the cohort described, which is a reason to treat a scan based measure and a test score as two different measurements, not as one thing with two names.

None of this concerns how much of the brain a person uses at any moment, a separate popular belief that the page on the ten percent brain myth examines.

6 Why is a single brain age a poor summary of a person's abilities?

Abilities do not age on the same schedule and practice raises scores on repeated tasks, so one number labeled as an age mixes things that move at different speeds. Two findings from the cognitive literature bear on this, and they apply to any single number that claims to summarize a mind.

The first is about timing. Hartshorne and Germine analyzed data from 48,537 online participants together with normative data from standardized IQ and memory tests, in Psychological Science in 2015. They report considerable heterogeneity in when abilities peak: some peak and begin to decline around high school graduation, some plateau in early adulthood and begin to decline in a person's 30s, and others do not peak until a person reaches their 40s or later. If that is right, a result built from a mix of speed, memory and control tasks depends on which tasks went into the mix, and a different mix would give a different "age". That last step is our inference from the finding, not a claim the authors make. The pages on how IQ changes with age and on average scores by age band own the age trends, and the guide to the Cattell Horn Carroll model names the abilities involved.

The second is about practice. Scharfen, Peters and Holling pooled 174 samples from 122 studies, with 786 test outcomes and 153,185 participants, in a meta analysis in Intelligence in 2018. They found significant retest effects, meaning that scores rise when a cognitive ability test is taken again, and no further gains after the third administration. They also report that the size of the effect depends on the ability and content tested, the equivalence of the test forms, the retest interval and the participant's age. A game played daily is a retest condition by design. A result that improves from one week to the next may reflect familiarity with the tasks as much as anything else, and again this is our inference about games, because the meta analysis concerns cognitive ability tests.

The third issue is precision. A result reported in whole years looks precise. The MRI models above, built from brain scans, miss by about five years on average. The Nintendo page and the two Lumosity help articles read for this article give no margin of error. A good score report states one: the page on reliability and validity in IQ testing explains why, and the ACIS report shows a 95 percent confidence interval around the Full Scale IQ.

A different idea with a similar name is mental age. It is a historical age equivalent from early intelligence testing, and the page on mental age and ratio IQ covers the meaning, the formula and the modern limits of the idea. The sources read for this article do not describe a game's brain age as a mental age or as an IQ.

7 How does an age normed test compare you with people your age?

An age normed test does not report how old your brain is; it reports where your performance stands among people of your own age, which is the question a brain age tries to answer without the reference group. The mechanism is simple to state. The publisher gives the test to a large reference sample divided into age bands, and then converts your raw score into a position relative to the band that matches your age.

On the standard scales this produces three kinds of number. A subtest gives a scaled score, with a mean of 10 and a standard deviation of 3 in the ACIS report, so that a score of 10 is typical for your age. An index or a Full Scale score uses a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, which the page on why a standard deviation of 15 matters explains. A percentile says what share of the comparison group scored at or below you, and the page on IQ score versus percentile shows why the two cannot simply be averaged, while the IQ percentile calculator converts one into the other. The central point is that age enters the calculation as the comparison group. It is never an output.

Professional guidance treats this as basic practice. The American Psychological Association's Guidelines for Psychological Assessment and Evaluation, approved in March 2020 and read October 29, 2026, say in Guideline 8 that psychologists recognize the importance of considering age, gender, ethnicity, primary language and individual influences when selecting and administering tests, which allows valid normative comparisons. Guideline 7 adds that individual performance on psychological tests is only one piece of an assessment, a reason, in our reading, not to treat a single number from any test as a verdict. The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA, APA and NCME, 2014), which are open access, ask in Standard 5.8 that norms refer to clearly described populations that include the people with whom users will ordinarily want to compare their examinees.

A clinical battery shows the same design at full scale. Pearson's product page for the WAIS-5, read October 29, 2026, describes an individually administered clinical instrument for ages 16:0 to 90:11, with about 45 minutes for the seven subtest Full Scale IQ and about 60 minutes for the ten primary index subtests, at Pearson qualification level C. The page says the test was normed on people whose primary language is English. None of this is a brain age either. It is a reference sample, a defined age range and an examiner who administers it one person at a time.

ACIS also reports against age norms, in an online format and without an examiner. Its adult norms cover ages 16 to 90, and each report gives a Full Scale IQ with its 95 percent confidence interval, six primary indices, scaled scores from 1 to 19 and percentiles. A 30 year old and a 70 year old who produce the same raw performance can receive different standings, because each is compared with adults of a comparable age; the sibling page on IQ testing at age 30 covers that age group. The technical manual is the place for the documentation behind the scores.

8 How do the real options compare when you want a brain age test?

The options differ less in how clever they are than in what they compare you with, who supervises them and what you receive, and a short table makes those differences visible before you spend time or money. Costs below were read from the pages cited on October 29, 2026 and can change. Where the sources opened for this article do not state a figure, the cell says so.

The doctor visit is in the table because a worry about memory is a different question from a brain age, and the route for it is not a game or a quiz. The National Institute on Aging says on its page on memory problems, forgetfulness and aging (content reviewed November 22, 2023, read October 29, 2026) that a doctor can perform tests and assessments to help determine the source of memory problems. No game or quiz in the table does that.

How to choose follows from your purpose. If you want entertainment, a game is a game, and the only risk is reading its number as more than a score. If you want to know where your performance stands among adults of your age, you need a test whose norms are described, which is the subject of the comparison of the best online IQ tests and of the guide to every place you can take an IQ test, in person and online. If you want to see what a normed test feels like before paying, the free IQ test guide explains what the trial includes.

9 Which abilities do brain age tasks sample, and which ACIS subtests measure them?

The exercises behind Nintendo's brain age sample processing speed, short term memory and self control, and in the Cattell Horn Carroll (CHC) model the first two are named abilities with normed measures. Nintendo's page lists three demands: information processing speed, short term memory and self control. None of the three is reasoning or acquired knowledge, so a result built from them describes a narrow slice of cognition.

In CHC terms the first is processing speed (Gs), the efficiency of simple, timed operations. The second belongs with working memory and short term storage (Gwm and Gsm). Self control is not one of the broad abilities in the model's usual list. The ACIS Digit Span page lists attention control among the influences on span performance, which is, in our reading, the nearest fit. The pages for each ACIS subtest describe the formats, and they never show items.

• Symbol Search asks the examinee to scan target and search sets and decide quickly whether a match is present. It is processing speed (Gs).
• Coding asks the examinee to use a symbol key to convert items quickly and accurately. It is also Gs, and the sibling page on the digit symbol substitution test covers this symbol substitution family of tasks.
• Digit Span measures immediate auditory verbal storage and, in more demanding versions, manipulation of ordered material. It is working memory (Gwm and Gsm), and it presents items as audio, so it needs working sound.
• Matrix Reasoning measures rule discovery in unfamiliar visual patterns. It is fluid reasoning (Gf), a different ability from the speed and span tasks above.

In the ACIS report the two speed subtests make up the Processing Speed Index, covered on the sibling page for the Processing Speed Index, and the memory subtests make up the Working Memory Index. The Quick form includes Digit Span and Alphanumeric Sequencing, which are working memory subtests, and no speed subtest. The Optimized and Full Scale forms include Coding and Symbol Search. The Custom Test price of 5 dollars per subtest means a processing speed index from its two subtests costs 10 dollars, which is our arithmetic on the published price, and the guide to taking a normed processing speed test explains what that index shows.

The point of the mapping is not to sell more subtests. It is that a profile with names answers a question a single age cannot: which abilities are high or low for your age, compared with each other and with adults of your own age. The reasoning and knowledge subtests are part of a profile that a speed and span picture leaves out.

10 How should you read the score, and how precise is it?

Read the confidence interval first, the indices second and the single headline number last, because a score is an estimate with a margin of error and a shorter test gives a less precise estimate than a longer one. The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing make the last point in their chapter on test design and development, where they say that test length must balance testing time with the precision of the resulting scores, with longer tests generally leading to more precise scores.

The vocabulary is short. A scaled score places one subtest on a scale with a mean of 10. An index combines the subtests of one domain on a scale with a mean of 100. The Full Scale IQ combines all of them. A percentile translates any of these into a position in the comparison group. The 95 percent confidence interval is a range built so that, across many people, it contains the person's true score about 95 percent of the time, and it is usually wider for a single subtest than for an index. This is why a result reported as an exact age deserves a question about its margin of error.

Two practical rules follow. First, compare indices with each other as well as with the average: the page on index score differences explains how to read a gap between two of your own indices. Second, do not read a small change between two sessions as a change in ability. The retest meta analysis reviewed above found that scores rise on the second and third administration of an ability test and then stop rising, so a second score soon after the first partly reflects familiarity. The same review reports that the size of the effect depends on the interval between sessions, the equivalence of the forms, the ability tested and the participant's age, so the size of the familiarity effect cannot be assumed to be zero.

The ACIS report is built to show these quantities. Every form reports a Full Scale IQ with its 95 percent confidence interval, and the Full Scale form measures all 20 subtests across six domains. That describes what the report contains and makes no claim here about the precision of any particular score. The documentation sits in the technical manual, and this page does not restate figures from it.

11 How should you take an online test, and what should you do if memory worries you?

Take an online test in conditions that protect the score, and take a worry about your memory to a doctor, because a quiet room cannot turn a self administered test into a medical evaluation. The two halves of this section are separate on purpose.

For the first half, the conditions that matter for an unsupervised session are ordinary ones. Use a device with a screen large enough to show the tasks comfortably and a stable connection; the sibling page on taking an IQ test on a phone covers what changes on a small screen. Check your sound before you start, because Digit Span, Alphanumeric Sequencing and Arithmetic present their items as audio and need working sound. Choose a time when you are rested and a room where you will not be interrupted. ACIS allows breaks, saves progress between subtests and gives 30 days to finish, so a long form does not have to be done in one sitting. Wear your glasses or hearing aids if you use them, since a sensory difficulty can lower a score for reasons unrelated to the ability being measured. Do not practice on games beforehand to improve the result: as the research above shows, practice changes scores on the practiced tasks, and it blurs the comparison a normed test is trying to make.

For the second half, the National Institute on Aging page cited earlier makes several plain points. It says forgetfulness can be a normal part of aging while dementia is not. It says to talk with a doctor if you are experiencing noticeable changes in your memory, and that a doctor can perform tests and assessments to help determine the source of memory problems. It also advises caution about pills, supplements, brain training computer games and similar treatments that promise to improve memory or prevent brain disorders. That caution concerns products that make those promises, and ACIS makes no such promise. The related point for any test is that no online score, ours included, can establish whether your memory is healthy or why it feels different.

The ACIS pages on IQ testing for adults over 60 and on IQ testing for adults over 40 address how age norms and timed subtests work for older adults. They do not change the rule above. A normal score does not rule out a medical problem, and a low score does not establish one, so a result of any kind is a reason to read the report carefully and, if you are concerned, to speak with a clinician.

12 Where ACIS sits, and what a buyer should do

ACIS is a normed online battery that compares your performance with adults of your age, and it is not a brain age test, a medical test or a clinical instrument. We sell it, so this section is a disclosure: the strengths are stated below, and the limits are stated with the same weight.

What ACIS offers: 20 subtests in six domains, reported as a Full Scale IQ with its 95 percent confidence interval and six primary indices, with scaled subtest scores, percentiles and adult norms for ages 16 to 90. It is a one time payment with no subscription. Quick costs 15 dollars (6 subtests in 3 domains, about 45 minutes), Optimized 30 dollars (13 subtests in 5 domains, about 110 minutes) and Full Scale 50 dollars (all 20 subtests, about 175 minutes), prices read on October 29, 2026. The Custom Test lets you choose subtests at 5 dollars each, and at 10 subtests the Full Scale form costs the same. The free trial needs no card and is limited to one per person. The guarantee reads: "Full refund within 5 days if the report does not deliver the features described at checkout or a technical issue prevents you from accessing your results." You can look at a finished report before paying through the example report.

What ACIS does not do: it is online and unsupervised, it is not a clinical or diagnostic instrument, it is in English only, and it is not for hiring, school accommodations or admission to high IQ societies. Its manual notes that verbal and knowledge tasks are affected by English proficiency and educational exposure. It reports no brain age, and it cannot say why a score is where it is, whether anything medical lies behind it, or whether your memory has changed.

The professional standards back that framing. The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA, APA and NCME, 2014) say in Standard 1.2 that a rationale should be presented for each intended interpretation of test scores for a given use, together with a summary of the evidence and theory bearing on it, and note in the comment to Standard 1.1 that no test permits interpretations that are valid for all purposes or in all situations. Standard 5.8, cited above, asks that norms refer to clearly described populations. The American Psychological Association's 2020 guidelines add, in Guideline 15, that the essential criteria for evaluating technology enhanced measures are reliability, validity and fairness. Applied here, those documents say two things: a score supports only the interpretation its evidence supports, and a test on a screen is judged by the same criteria as a test on paper.

A concrete next step depends on your reason for reading this page.

• If you were curious about your standing among adults of your age, start with the free trial, or choose a form from the guide to IQ tests for adults and the other pages linked above, and read the interval before the headline number.
• If a game or an app gave you a brain age and you are unsure what to make of it, treat it as a score on that game and compare it with nothing else.
• If you are worried about your memory or thinking, do not use any online test, including ours. Speak with a doctor.

13 Sources Behind This Page

Every figure on this page traces to one of the following sources, each linked in the body at the point where it is used, and the one derived figure (the 10 dollar price of two Custom Test subtests) is labeled as our arithmetic in the text. Web pages and prices were read on October 29, 2026 and can change.

• Federal Trade Commission. Lumosity to Pay 2 Million Dollars to Settle FTC Deceptive Advertising Charges for Its Brain Training Program. Press release, January 5, 2016.
• Simons DJ, Boot WR, Charness N, Gathercole SE, Chabris CF, Hambrick DZ, Stine-Morrow EAL. Do "Brain-Training" Programs Work? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 2016, volume 17, issue 3, pages 103 to 186.
• Owen AM, Hampshire A, Grahn JA, Stenton R, Dajani S, Burns AS, Howard RJ, Ballard CG. Putting brain training to the test. Nature, 2010, volume 465, issue 7299, pages 775 to 778.
• Nouchi R, Taki Y, Takeuchi H, Hashizume H, Akitsuki Y, Shigemune Y, Sekiguchi A, Kotozaki Y, Tsukiura T, Yomogida Y, Kawashima R. Brain Training Game Improves Executive Functions and Processing Speed in the Elderly: A Randomized Controlled Trial. PLoS ONE, 2012, volume 7, issue 1, article e29676.
• Franke K, Ziegler G, Klöppel S, Gaser C. Estimating the age of healthy subjects from T1-weighted MRI scans using kernel methods: Exploring the influence of various parameters. NeuroImage, 2010, volume 50, issue 3, pages 883 to 892.
• Cole JH, Franke K. Predicting Age Using Neuroimaging: Innovative Brain Ageing Biomarkers. Trends in Neurosciences, 2017, volume 40, issue 12, pages 681 to 690.
• Cole JH, Marioni RE, Harris SE, Deary IJ. Brain age and other bodily "ages": implications for neuropsychiatry. Molecular Psychiatry, 2019, volume 24, issue 2, pages 266 to 281.
• Hartshorne JK, Germine LT. When Does Cognitive Functioning Peak? The Asynchronous Rise and Fall of Different Cognitive Abilities Across the Life Span. Psychological Science, 2015, volume 26, issue 4, pages 433 to 443.
• Scharfen J, Peters JM, Holling H. Retest effects in cognitive ability tests: A meta-analysis. Intelligence, 2018, volume 67, pages 44 to 66.
• American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association and National Council on Measurement in Education. Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. American Educational Research Association, 2014 (Standards 1.1, 1.2 and 5.8; chapter 4, test length).
• American Psychological Association, APA Task Force on Psychological Assessment and Evaluation Guidelines. APA Guidelines for Psychological Assessment and Evaluation. Approved by the APA Council of Representatives, March 2020 (Guidelines 7, 8 and 15).
• Pearson Assessments. WAIS-5, Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Fifth Edition. Publisher product page, read October 29, 2026.
• Nintendo. Dr Kawashima's Brain Training for Nintendo Switch. Australian product page, read October 29, 2026.
• Lumosity Help Center. How is LPI calculated? Help article updated July 27, 2026, read October 29, 2026.
• Lumosity Help Center. Can I see how I compare to other Lumosity members? Help article dated April 3, 2025, read October 29, 2026.
• National Institute on Aging. Memory Problems, Forgetfulness, and Aging. Content reviewed November 22, 2023, read October 29, 2026.

14 Frequently Asked Questions