Personal Review of Lumosity

I wanted to give a brief review of Lumosity, the site where you can sign up to do brain exercising games.

My reason for joining in the first place was that I have noticed my memory getting worse, and I had an incident with a client where I couldn’t work out the change following a sale. The calculation was simple maths, so it should have been easy. Given that my dad has dementia, I wanted to look into ways I can keep my brain working.

When I first joined and started doing the exercises I was really shocked at how badly I did. I was in the bottom 30% in my age group. It took around 20 days to get to the 50% mark or higher for attention, speed and problem-solving categories, however I was still low in the maths and memory categories. I’ll try an update on these at a later date. Bear in mind that a lot of improvement will be down to learning how to play the games better. That’s to be expected, but I think that even learning the games can exercise the brain as well.

Here’s the chart at 21 days:

After breakfast and walking the dog, I do my 15 minutes of set games. When completed I do feel my brain is ‘fresher’ for some reason. I have this sense the my reaction times are quicker in real life, but not sure if my memory is better – in other words, the benefit has possibly extended to real life in some aspects – again, I will try and report back as I get further.

I find the games enjoyable and I sometimes go back later in the day and do some more, which is encouraged.

When you google Lumosity you hear about how they were sued and fined millions for claiming that scientific evidence proved that exercising your brain prevented certain conditions when there were no studies showing this. Obviously they shouldn’t have done that, but following my work in other areas, I find that non-pharma solutions to health problems are often attacked and driven underground on the basis that ‘there is no evidence’. Just because nobody has paid for a study, doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. At one time there was no evidence that statins affected memory, now it is a recognised side effect.

I came across a small study of people with severe mental impairment which compared two different brands. Lumosity was the more popular of the two. It appears that some people showed improvements that were extended to real life, others didn’t. Further research is needed.

One point made in the study was that as a protocol it did no harm. The price is reasonable and if you compare it to paying for other games, in the right ball park.

So, in summary, I recommend it as a fun way to use your brain on the theory of ‘use it or lose it’. More rigorous scientific evidence might be forthcoming one day, but it does no harm and it might be doing you some good. For the record, I have also changed what I eat for breakfast and taken some brain-specific supplements, so those changes may be having an effect.

Note: I have no relationship with Lumosity.