It's one of the most searched questions about the cube: does solving it make you smarter? Or is it only for very clever people?
The short answer: you don't need to be a genius to solve it and, as far as we know, it won't raise your IQ either. But it does train some very useful skills. Let's take it one step at a time.
Do you have to be very smart to solve it?
It depends on how you solve it. Working it out on your own, with no help at all, is really hard: Ernő Rubik himself, who invented it, needed over a month to do it. The cube has more than 43 quintillion possible combinations, so you won't solve it by turning at random.
But hardly anyone solves it that way. Most people learn a method: a few steps, each with a short sequence of moves that you repeat. With a simple method, like our step-by-step solution, 8-year-old kids solve it, and so do older people who never thought they could. You don't need to be good at math or have an amazing memory. You need patience.
So solving the cube doesn't prove you're a genius. It proves something that may be worth more: that you set out to learn something hard and saw it through.
Does it make you smarter?
Let's be honest here: there are no studies showing that solving the Rubik's Cube raises your general intelligence or your IQ.
What has been studied a lot is whether training one specific skill (chess, music or "brain training" games) makes you smarter in general. The big reviews of that research, such as those by psychologists Giovanni Sala and Fernand Gobet, reach the same conclusion: you get much better at what you practice, but that improvement barely carries over to anything else. Someone who plays a lot of chess gets better at chess, not smarter at everything. The cube most likely works the same way.
There's also a selection effect: people who enjoy puzzles often already have good spatial skills and plenty of patience. If many cubers are good students, that doesn't mean the cube made them that way.
What the cube does train
Not raising your IQ doesn't mean it's useless. While you solve the cube you practice:
- Spatial skills: picturing how the pieces will move before you turn a face. This is a skill you can train: an analysis of more than 200 studies (Uttal and colleagues, 2013) found that spatial skills improve with practice, that the improvement lasts, and that it also shows up in tasks that weren't practiced. And spatial skills are closely linked to math, science and engineering.
- Memory: first you remember the moves of each step; with practice, your hands do them on their own.
- Focus and patience: one wrong turn undoes your work, so you learn to slow down and pay attention.
- Breaking problems into parts: nobody solves the cube in one go. First a cross, then a face, then a layer… Splitting a big problem into small steps is useful for almost everything.
- Hand coordination, especially if you try to get faster and faster.
That's why some schools use the cube in class: to work on geometry and spatial thinking, and to show students that something that looked impossible can be learned step by step.
A puzzle with a lot of science inside
If you're curious, the cube hides a lot of math. Did you know that any cube, however scrambled, can be solved in 20 moves or fewer? And once you can solve it, you can make Rubik's Cube patterns, like the checkerboard or the cube in a cube: a really fun way to understand how the pieces move.
So, is it worth it?
Yes. Even if it won't turn you into a genius, learning to solve the cube is a challenge anyone can take on, and it trains your spatial skills, your memory and your patience. It also gives you the satisfaction of doing something many people think is impossible. If you can't solve it yet, start with our step-by-step Rubik's Cube solution: with a little practice, you'll get there.