Lumosity: Day #1

On Sunday, March 3, 2013, I embarked on the dual quests described in the Greetings post. I decided to keep the Lumosity and running writeups sequestered into different posts, so that if by some chance anyone ever reads this blog, they can skip the half they don't care about. If there are hordes of people out there transitioning to minimalist running shoes who are also gravely concerned with their cognitive health, well, then I apologize for making you look for both sets of posts.

So, Lumosity! The gist of Lumosity is this: scientists used to think cognitive ability was fixed in childhood. Now, they believe in something called neuroplasticity, which is a fancy way of expressing the idea that your brain can grow, change, and improve in response to repeated stimuli. Lumosity attempts to capitalize on that by having you play games that help your brain to "exercise," thereby building new neurons and creating more neural pathways and connections. They claim to be able to improve your memory, attention, and problem solving skills, among many others. There is a ton of brain scan and other science behind this, which I looked into, and it doesn't seem completely farfetched to me. The underlying belief is that the games target simple cognitive tasks that are the building blocks of more complex mental processes. So if you want to be able to concentrate better amidst distraction, Lumosity has you play a game where it shows you a group of five birds. They can be pointing any of the four directions (up, down, left, or right). But the game asks you to press the keyboard arrow that corresponds to the direction of the central bird ONLY. The birds are configured in any number of patterns, so you need to determine which is the central bird, and what direction it's facing. And you have to do this quickly. There's a timer running. You come back to the site everyday and spend about 15 minutes playing a few of these games. You do this day after day, and the site claims your cognitive abilities will improve.

I'd been messing around with the free trial for a while, and decided today to pony up the cash and sign up for a year's subscription to the entire site. Paying for it gets you access to more brain exercises, more personally customized training plans, and detailed comparisons of your performance to people in your age group. Interestingly, my "stats" so far tell me that I'm well below the Lumosity average for every skill, with the exception of Problem Solving, which for them means solving simple math problems quickly and accurately. I'm in the 93rd percentile for Problem Solving. That's surprising to me, because I think I'm pretty bad at math.

One of the games was a word game. There was (of course, as always) a timer running. The game gives you a 3-letter prefix, and you have to make as many words as possible that start with that 3-letter combination. I thought I did extremely well. The site did not agree. Now, my words were good words. SAT words, my mother would say. One of my prefixes was "con;" I had words like conflation, congruence, confluence, continental- like I said, good words. I had many words. When I was done, the game suggested I might have entered "cone" as one of my words. I feel I was robbed.

So today, the games were the word game I just described, "Bubble Words," the math game from above called "Rain Drops," and "Bird Watching," which is to train your concentration and peripheral vision.