Get Smarter With Apps
I landed myself a rather cushy task this month which involved spending most of my time in the offce with a steaming mug of coffee rather than hunting for a very specifc motherboard on Lamington Road in a heavy downpour. It all started when my Digit friends came across this brain training website/app called Lumosity.
Lumosity’s gamifed training program promises a substantial boost in your cognitive and reasoning abilities, in other words it makes you smarter and more intelligent. These claims kicked off a huge debate regarding the effcacy of such brain training programs in actually enhancing your brain’s abilities.
Now, a lot of research is going on in this particular direction with some of the world’s best psychologists and neuroscientists working to fnd conclusive evidence backed by statistics. But unlike peer reviewed research papers we just took on to test these claims ourselves, we decided to use this service and see for ourselves if it enhanced our brains capabilities. I was to use Lumosity for a month and get a frst hand encounter with serious brain training. The next step was determining how would we measure my progress – using Lumos-ity’s own numbers didn’t make much sense here. Hence, I decided to settle on a standardized battery of tests created by the Medical Research Council at Cambridge University. The results would give me my position on a bell curve of the population’s performance in the areas of memory, reasoning and verbal ability. I would take the test again after a month and measure my progress and verify the validity of claims discussed earlier.
A little background information on Lumosity before proceeding further: It was co-founded by one Michael Scanlon, who abandoned his PhD in neuroscience at Stanford to convert his research into a fedgling business. Lumosity had launched in 2005, it has grown 150% year-on-year and as of April 2013 it has 40 million members. Lumosity’s iOS app has been downloaded more than 10 million times with the app frequently fnding it’s way to the top positions in its category. The science behind Lumosity is what they call ‘neuroplasticity’, which is defned as the brain’s ability to physically reshape itself when faced with new, challenging problems. Lumosity also carries out research by collaborating with researchers from prestigious universities across the world, which it calls the Human Cognition Project.
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| Lumosity |
I took my initial Cambridge Brain Sciences test on 25th of May, it turned out that I wasn’t as intelligent as I thought.
I was in the 34th percentile for short-term memory, 71st percentile for reasoning ability and the 46th percentile for verbal intelligence. My regime was to train with Lumosity in the morning after or accompanied by my morning cuppa everyday for one month. I would take the Cambridge Brain Science IQ challenge once again at the end of the month to see if I’ve actually made progress or not. Another thing to add here is that I used the free version of the program, which according to Lumosity was not giving me the beneft of a comprehensive training program. The paid subscription service would have given me personalized training,access to all the games that
Lumosity has to offer, anytime and compare my scores with others. A monthly subscription costs $14.95 per month, which according to the current exchange would convert to `887 per month. The charge comes down to $6.7, which is equivalent to `397 per month if you commit for a year or $4.99 that is about `295 per month if you commit for two years. There is an option to purchase the subscription for a lifetime that costs $299.95 that comes to around `17,779.
The app’s interface is incredibly simple and dead easy to follow when you register for the program you are greeted with a wizard which helps you build your personalized training program. The areas where Lumosity focuses are memory, attention, speed, fexibility and training. Lumosity offers different games to improve specifc aspects in these areas viz., for memory, the aspects on which training is offered are recalling the location of objects, remembering names after the frst introduction, learning new subjects quickly and accurately and keeping track of several ideas at the same time. I wanted to check all the tests that they had to offer thus
I selected every aspect of focus areas on offer for my personal training.
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| After a day of training on Lumosity |
Alternative Brain training programs/Games
Brain Spade Games
www.brainspade.com
AARP Brain Games
games.aarp.org
Brain Metrix
www.brainmetrix.com
Brain Age Games
www.freebrainagegames.com
Mind Games
www.mindgames.com/brain-games.php
Miniclip
http://www.miniclip.com/games/
genre-476/brain-training/en/
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| Speed Match is good to sharpen the brain |
The games themselves are incredibly polished and well designed. I played ‘Speed Match’, which improves my speed and memory. I played ‘Eagle Eye’ and ‘Lost in Migration’ which worked on my attention skills. I played ‘Speed Match’ and ‘Memory Map’ enhancing my short- term memory and ‘Word Bubbles’ and ‘Rain Drops’ for fexibility and problem solving skills respectively. In the free version you can play these games only once per day. The games are not acces-sible after you’ve completed your daily dose of brain boosters. Another thing to note is that these games are assigned to you on a random basis, thus everyday is like a lottery. Lumosity’s own scoring index is called BPI (Brain Power Index), which it derives by comparing your game scores with results from other players, and assigning you an index based on your relative performance.
Now talking about the results, I tried to stick to the regime that I came up with, but quite frankly I was not able to do it everyday. I stuck to the schedule for the frst two weeks but then the practice session kept on becoming more sporadic. I found the games slightly juvenile - stars dancing around the screen, submarines, monsters and penguins, which made it quite boring to trudge through the games everday. Though this is what I felt, and other people who are playing these games might not necessarily feel the same. I took the fnal Cambridge Brain Sciences test at the same time and same conditions as the frst one, so there is no discrepancy in the result. I scored in the 38th percentile in short-term memory, 78th percentile in reasoning ability and 49th percentile in verbal ability, a modicum of progress in all areas. According to Lumosity itself
I have been able to bump my BPI from 485 to 672 in the span of one month, with the largest gains in memory, speed and problem solving. The free version does not let you see your historical performance and the detailed breakdown of your performance, but if you keep the track of your scores then you can make out your strengths and weaknesses easily enough.
The most important question, is it actually effective? I am now supposedly more intelligent than I started out, but the skeptic in me refuses to believe.
Does intelligence in its truest sense only mean getting better in these sections? I couldn’t actually see my performance on each and every game that I played but I could make out from the general progress in scores that the more I played a particular game, the more I scored.
I played these games repeatedly for quite some time and the final test panned out in the same vein, and thus
I believe that I’ve gotten better only at these particular games and tests. None- theless, it does feel like I have achieved something even if it’s a few notches higher in the BPI or hitting a higher percentile on the tests. Not necessarily boosting your IQ and making you a genius, these games in my opinion are just a form of mental exercise. They just keep your brain in shape like any other muscle in the body, the choice of training is entirely your. It can be Sudoku or a crossword in your daily paper, riddles and puzzle, math-based exercises or even brain games such as these.
Categories:
APPS
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