
The implication was that playing the game literally makes people smarter. In a 2008 study, Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl, now of the University of Maryland, found that young adults who practiced a stripped-down, less cartoonish version of the game also showed improvement in a fundamental cognitive ability known as “fluid” intelligence: the capacity to solve novel problems, to learn, to reason, to see connections and to get to the bottom of things.

What is surprising is what else it improved. This isn’t surprising: practice improves performance on almost every task humans engage in, whether it’s learning to read or playing horseshoes. But most people who stick with the game do get better with practice. Almost no one gets past Level 3 without training. At Level 2, even adults find the task somewhat taxing. So began 10 minutes of a remarkably demanding concentration game. O.K., ready? Once we start, anyone who talks loses a star.” For Level 3, you have to remember where it was three times ago.
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“If you get to Level 2, you have to remember where the cat was two windows ago. “And here’s where it gets confusing,” Wulfson continued. But the game is progressive: the cats keep coming, and the kids have to keep watching and remembering. On Level 1, the children earned a point by remembering which window the cat was just in.

Every few seconds, a black cat appeared in one of the house’s five windows, then vanished. On each of the children’s monitors, there was a cartoon image of a haunted house, with bats and a crescent moon in a midnight blue sky. “Can somebody raise their hand,” asked Kate Wulfson, the instructor, “and explain to me how you get points?” Minutes later, they were hunkered down in front of the Apple computers lining the room’s perimeter, hoping to do what was, until recently, considered impossible: increase their intelligence through training. Early on a drab afternoon in January, a dozen third graders from the working-class suburb of Chicago Heights, Ill., burst into the Mac Lab on the ground floor of Washington-McKinley School in a blur of blue pants, blue vests and white shirts.
