Lumosity keeps you from getting dumber

I'm a happy owner of a Nintendo DS and one of my favorite games for it is Brain Age, which lets you do a variety of small puzzles and arithmetic to hone your mental fitness. If you don't feel like shelling out $130 for Nintendo's hardware, there's Lumosity from Lumos Labs, a Web service that offers a similar multitude of small mental exercises that run right in your browser and are actually really fun.

Lumosity comes with nearly a dozen "games" to play, with each one working out a different aspect of your mental prowess, including memory, cognitive control, processing speed, and the all-important attention. As you play, your scores are tracked and grouped together in an progress chart that you can dig into and try to figure out what's been improving--or what needs some work. Games will also let you know when you haven't performed as well as you usually do by tracking your historical performance.

You have various games to choose from. Seen here is 'Lost in Migration,' a game that challenges your cognition skills.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Earlier today I started out my brain-training session with a game called Bird Watching. It's meant to track your attention, but it ends up being a very strange mashup of Nintendo's Duck Hunt meets hangman, where the goal is to not only shoot a picture of the bird that pops up on the screen for half a second, but also remember the letter that flashes in the center of the screen. These letters begin to fill out the name of the bird, and it's your job to guess before you've captured all the letters--a process that (hopefully) uses a number of parts of your brain.

'Speed Match' was my favorite game of the bunch, forcing you to remember if what you're looking at is the same as what came before it. (click to enlarge)

Following bird watching my heart rate went up about 30 beats with Speed Match, a game that pits you against a variety of symbols in the hopes of figuring out whether the symbol you're looking at is the same one that came before. To navigate you simply have to use your keyboard's arrow keys. It's quite a bit more fun than Word Bubbles, another game that makes you type words that start with the three letters they give you. Scrabulous players will mop the floor with this one.

The other games were not nearly as memorable, including one that has you type in the direction of the middle bird seen in flying formations (apparently to test reaction time), as well as a mine-sweeper-like game that has you navigate a garden to get to a flower while avoiding space aliens.

The real hook of the service is the stats tracking, which will keep track of your mental scores indefinitely and do analysis of your cognitive prowess based on how you've been scoring in each title. Like Nintendo's Brain Age series, it gives you some of this information in a four-way chart, as well as plenty of line charts that hopefully are getting better each day.

At $80 a year, Lumosity isn't exactly cheap when compared with Nintendo's Brain Age series, but you don't need to buy any extra hardware and the creators continue to add new games. There's also a two-week free trial you can play without entering any credit card information.

[royauty]

I'm a little confused. Since no-one in their right mind would pay 80 dollars per year for a game, the makers don't really hope to improve their users' brain functions. If it really did what it advertised, they would lose all their subscribers!

[sarah_braun]

I think 80 dollars per year is expensive, too. But for everyone who is still interested in brain games i can recommend neuro-nation.com because it's free. However, i'm not sure if brain games really improve brain functionality...

[nabplus1]

My 10 1/2 year old son had severe ADHD symptons amount other little things. He takes so much medicine to keep his level. He sees a doctor for Neurofeedback who strongly suggested we use Lumosity.com to improve his concentration and to help him train his brain how to function better in dailly life and school. The doctor even let us sign up at the price he gets. These games are truly great. I see him read longer and with more stamina. I am glad for your games and recommend them to ADHD help chat rooms. Best Regards,

[brain-exercises]

Recent research has demonstrated that any kind of brain exercise is good for us for keeping the mind active, so I'm sure that the Lumosity are great in this regard. But very little research has shown that such exercises have a measurable and significant impact on cognitive functioning. The only academic research I'm aware of is Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl's study on Training Working Memory (PNAS April 2008), you should check it out. Jaeggi and Buschkuehl's team recorded increases in mental agility (fluid intelligence) of more than 40% after 19 days of focused training with a dual n-back progressive method.

I was so impressed that I contacted the research team and developed a software program using the same method so that anyone can achieve these improvements at home.
http://www.iqtesttraining.com -- The IQ Training Program

Martin Walker
mind evolve, llc
PS. It's only $24 for a lifetime license...