Does Golf Make You Smarter? What the Research Shows for IQ

Golf has not been shown to make anyone smarter: no study has measured IQ before and after taking up the game. The best trial, which randomly assigned 106 Japanese adults aged 65 and over to 24 weeks of golf lessons or a health-education class, found a gain on one memory test and no change on a general screening test of cognition or on tests of attention and processing speed.

Golf does have a striking health record, and that record is the main source of the idea that it is good for the brain. This page covers what the golf studies actually measured, what changes in golfers' brains, why the mental side of golf is mostly golf-specific, and why the people who play golf may differ from those who do not before they ever pick up a club.

The best-known golf statistic concerns death rates. Farahmand and colleagues linked the membership list of the Swedish Golf Federation to the national death register. Among 300,818 golfers, the death rate was 40% lower than in the general population of the same age, sex and socioeconomic status (standardized mortality ratio 0.60), which the authors equated to about five extra years of life. The most skilled players had the lowest death rates. The authors could not say how much of the gap was caused by golf itself.

Expert statements add to the impression. In the 2018 International Consensus Statement on Golf and Health, a panel of 25 experts agreed that golf, as a physical activity, is likely to reduce the risk of several chronic conditions, dementia among them, and that it can contribute to healthy ageing with cognitive benefits. Expert agreement is weaker evidence than a trial, and the dementia item rests on golf being a form of physical activity. The scoping review that preceded it, which screened 301 studies, found only limited evidence on golf and mental health.

The video above points to a further problem. Intelligence predicts how long people live: in a meta-analysis of 16 studies with more than 1.1 million participants, each standard deviation higher on cognitive tests in youth (15 IQ points) went with a 24% lower risk of death over the following decades. So when golfers outlive non-golfers, some of that gap may reflect who becomes a golfer.

Only a handful of studies have looked at golf and thinking directly, and most of them involve older adults.

• The randomized trial: In Shimada and colleagues' trial, 100 of the 106 participants completed testing after 24 weeks, and adherence to the golf programme was 96%. The golf group improved more than controls on "logical memory", a test of recalling short stories, both immediately and after a delay. There was no difference on the Mini-Mental State Examination (a short screening test for cognitive impairment), word-list memory, the Trail Making Test or a symbol-coding test of processing speed. The trial was registered, but a gain on one of several outcomes in a single study of 100 people is a modest result, and none of the measures was an IQ test.

• A large survey: A later cross-sectional study by the same group analysed 4,575 older Japanese adults. Cognitive decline (falling below the cutoff on at least one of four tests) was found in 14.1% of current golfers, 20.1% of those who had given up golf and 21.6% of people who had never played. Current golfers had lower odds of decline, and so did people with a longer golfing history, but the number of rounds played was not clearly related. Former golfers did not show the same advantage for overall cognitive decline, though they did for memory decline. A single survey cannot show which came first: people whose thinking or health is slipping are more likely to stop playing.

• One round of golf: Kettinen and colleagues had 25 healthy golfers aged about 69 play 18 holes, walk 6 km and Nordic walk 6 km on separate days. Immediately afterwards, all three activities had sped up a simple timed connect-the-dots task (Trail Making Test part A) by roughly four to seven seconds, and golf did no better than walking. Only the two walking conditions improved the harder version of the task that measures switching between rules.

• Learning golf late in life: Gowik and colleagues compared 22 older adults after a 22-week golf-learning programme or normal life and found a difference in resting brain activity, but no association with cognitive performance in either group.

The wider exercise literature puts these results in context. An umbrella review of randomized trials found an average effect of exercise on cognition of d = 0.22, which fell to 0.13 after accounting for active control groups and baseline differences, and to 0.05 after correcting for publication bias. Our page on whether exercise can affect your IQ score covers that research in full. Golf is a pleasant way to get moderate exercise, and there is no sign that it is a special case.

Brain-imaging studies show that golf practice changes the brain, in the way any well-practised skill does. Jäncke and colleagues found larger grey-matter volumes in a fronto-parietal network, regions involved in planning and guiding movement, in skilled golfers than in less-skilled golfers and non-golfers. The difference did not rise steadily with handicap or practice hours. It appeared as a step between players with at least 800 to 3,000 hours of practice and those with less.

A longitudinal study is more convincing. Bezzola and colleagues scanned golf novices aged 40 to 60 before and after 40 hours of practice and found grey-matter increases in sensorimotor regions and in visual areas that guide action. Those are the regions a golf swing uses. A change in brain structure tied to a motor skill is evidence of learning, and it says nothing about whether general reasoning has improved.

Golf certainly feels like a mental game, and research on putting shows why. Beilock and Carr found that experienced golfers remembered little about the details of specific putts, a sign that skilled putting runs as an automatic procedure. Putting suffered under pressure, and the authors' explanation is that pressure makes golfers monitor the steps of their stroke. Training players to perform while self-conscious removed the choking effect, while practice at doing two things at once did not. In a follow-up, experienced golfers putted more accurately while doing a distracting second task than when told to attend to their stroke.

The lesson is that expert golf depends on a highly practised skill. Psychologists separate "near transfer" (getting better at the trained skill and tasks very like it) from "far transfer" (gains in broad abilities such as general intelligence). Learning to manage pressure on the green is near transfer, and athletes in faster sports show the same pattern, as our page on whether tennis makes you smarter describes. Sala and colleagues' second-order meta-analysis of cognitive-training programmes found that once placebo effects and publication bias were controlled, effects on far-transfer measures were zero, and nothing in the golf research suggests golf escapes that pattern.

Selection matters at least as much. According to the 2018 consensus statement, golf participation is highest among men, middle-aged and older adults, and people of middle and higher socioeconomic class. Education and income both predict higher test scores, and adults who can still play 18 holes are, almost by definition, fit enough to walk a course. Any comparison of golfers with non-golfers inherits those differences.

No study has shown that golf raises IQ. One randomized trial in older adults found a gain on a story-recall memory test and no change on the other cognitive tests used.

Older adults who keep playing golf tend to score better on cognitive tests, but that evidence comes mostly from a single survey that cannot rule out healthier people simply being the ones who keep playing. Golf provides moderate physical activity, which has a small average benefit for cognition in trials.

No trial has tested that. Expert panels list dementia among conditions golf may help prevent because it is a form of physical activity, and anyone worried about memory changes should talk to a doctor.

Probably not. In a direct comparison of one round of golf with a 6 km walk, walking did as well or better on the cognitive tests used. Our page on walking and IQ covers that research.

There is no good evidence either way, since golf ability has not been compared with IQ in any study I could find. Golf skill depends heavily on practice, and the brain differences found so far are in regions that control movement.

Golf is sociable, low-risk exercise with an impressive link to long life, and it makes people better at golf. There is no evidence that it makes you smarter in the sense of raising IQ, and part of golfers' health advantage probably reflects who takes up the game. If you want an accurate measure of your reasoning ability, take a full-length online IQ test.

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2. Farahmand, B., Broman, G., de Faire, U., Vågerö, D., & Ahlbom, A. (2009). Golf: A game of life and death. Reduced mortality in Swedish golf players. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 19(3), 419-424. [doi.org/10.1111/j.1600-0838.2008.00814.x](. doi.org

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7. Kettinen, J., Tikkanen, H., Hiltunen, M., Murray, A., Horn, N., Taylor, W. R., & Venojärvi, M. (2023). Cognitive and biomarker responses in healthy older adults to a 18-hole golf round and different walking types: A randomised cross-over study. BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine, 9(4), e001629. [doi.org/10.1136/bmjsem-2023-001629](. doi.org

8. Gowik, J. K., Goelz, C., Vieluf, S., van den Bongard, F., & Reinsberger, C. (2023). Source connectivity patterns in the default mode network differ between elderly golf-novices and non-golfers. Scientific Reports, 13, 6215. [doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-31893-1](. doi.org

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11. Bezzola, L., Mérillat, S., Gaser, C., & Jäncke, L. (2011). Training-induced neural plasticity in golf novices. Journal of Neuroscience, 31(35), 12444-12448. [doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1996-11.2011](. doi.org

12. Beilock, S. L., & Carr, T. H. (2001). On the fragility of skilled performance: What governs choking under pressure? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130(4), 701-725. [doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.130.4.701](. doi.org

13. Beilock, S. L., Carr, T. H., MacMahon, C., & Starkes, J. L. (2002). When paying attention becomes counterproductive: Impact of divided versus skill-focused attention on novice and experienced performance of sensorimotor skills. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 8(1), 6-16. [doi.org/10.1037/1076-898X.8.1.6](. doi.org

14. Sala, G., Aksayli, N. D., Tatlidil, K. S., Tatsumi, T., Gondo, Y., & Gobet, F. (2019). Near and far transfer in cognitive training: A second-order meta-analysis. Collabra: Psychology, 5(1), 18. [doi.org/10.1525/collabra.203](. doi.org

Hero image: Golf ball on tee, by Stefanschenkon, CC0. Via Wikimedia Commons.