Is Chess a Workout for Your Brain?

In 2016, Lumosity paid $2 million to the FTC for claiming its games could sharpen your mind and protect against Alzheimer's. The science didn't exist. A year earlier, 75 neuroscientists had signed a consensus statement calling the whole industry's claims "frequently exaggerated." Study after study found the same thing: you get better at the game, and the game doesn't make you better at anything else.

Chess has been sold on similar promises for decades. It'll make your kid smarter. It'll keep grandma sharp. The European Parliament passed a declaration endorsing it as an educational tool. Twenty-five million children now play competitively worldwide.

But here's the thing: when you put chess under the same scrutiny that killed Lumosity, it doesn't completely fall apart.

The Bad News

The academic transfer everyone hopes for? It's thin.

A 2016 meta-analysis by Giovanni Sala and Fernand Gobet examined 24 studies with over 5,000 students. Chess instruction produced "modest" effects on math and cognition. When the researchers controlled for placebo — comparing chess kids to kids who got any enrichment activity — the advantage mostly disappeared. "More than half of educational interventions are better than chess instruction," they concluded.

The Institute of Education in London ran a randomized trial with nearly 4,000 students. Chess-trained kids showed no improvement in math, science, or literacy over controls. None.

"It doesn't generalize beyond playing the game," a UW Medicine researcher told Right as Rain. Same problem as Lumosity.

The Interesting News

But Lumosity doesn't show up differently on a brain scan. Chess does.

A 2020 study in Scientific Reports used fMRI to compare professional chess players to beginners. The experts showed enhanced "dynamic functional connectivity" — more fluid switching between cognitive states — not just in chess-related regions, but across the whole brain. The researchers called it evidence of "neuroplasticity mechanisms related to long-term skill acquisition."

A 2025 review of 18 neuroimaging studies found consistent differences between chess players and non-players: greater activation in visual processing and spatial perception, enhanced connectivity in decision-making networks, even structural changes in grey matter suggesting "increased neural efficiency."

This isn't just practice effects. It's reorganization.

A two-year study in India tracked schoolchildren who received weekly chess training against controls doing sports and extracurriculars. The chess group showed significant gains in working memory. The control group didn't.

What's Actually Happening

Here's the difference: Lumosity isolates one cognitive function and drills it. Chess integrates many.

A single game requires holding positions in working memory, evaluating future scenarios, recognizing patterns, managing time pressure, and regulating emotion — simultaneously, for hours, against an opponent trying to break you. That's closer to real cognitive demand than matching shapes on a screen.

The Harvard Gazette talked to David Canning, who's studying chess players' cognition. "The evidence for mental activity helping is mixed," he said. But he added: "It is possible that playing chess prevents cognitive decline."

Mixed isn't zero. Mixed is interesting.

The Senior Angle

For older adults, the data looks better than "mixed."

A 12-week pilot study gave institutionalized seniors two chess sessions per week. They showed significant improvements in attention, processing speed, and executive function — plus higher quality of life. A JAMA-cited study found that mentally stimulating activities like chess were associated with 9% lower dementia risk among healthy 70-year-olds.

The caveat, as always: people who play chess tend to already be higher-functioning. Canning at Harvard put it plainly: "People who play chess are higher performing than average, and they also tend to be on good trajectories."

Does chess create the trajectory? Or attract people already on it? Nobody knows.

The Bottom Line

Chess won't make your kid better at math. It won't prevent Alzheimer's. The transfer effects that would justify calling it a "cognitive gym" remain stubbornly unproven.

But the brain changes are real. The workout is genuine. And unlike Lumosity — which maxes out wherever the app designers decided — chess has no ceiling. You can play for 50 years and never stop being challenged.

If someone tells you it'll raise your IQ, ask for the study. But if you want an activity that's demanding, scalable, social, and produces measurable neurological effects?

Worse hobbies exist.