Lumosity Review

Lumosity may be the world’s best-known brain training program. Thanks to its numerous advertisements and entertaining games, Lumosity has become popular with people of all ages. Here’s our Lumosity review.

What is Lumosity?

Lumosity is a brain training website that promises to use entertaining games to make you smarter. According to a 2014 Business Insider article, the site had 50 million users, many of whom are paying $15 per month or $80 per year for full access (many users are also on the free trial).

As of September 2015, the site claimed to have 70 million members and 40 university collaborators.

The site can be found at Lumosity.com, where the company’s slogan is “cutting edge neuroscience personalized for you”.

Basically, Lumosity uses psychological science to create games that seem like fun distractions – but are actually improving the power of your brain.

There are 40+ games in total. Today, the company’s games are available online and can also be accessed through iOS and Android apps.

How Does Lumosity Work?

Lumosity separates its games into five different categories. These game categories are designed to address different areas of your brain. Every day, you receive a different customized training program catered to your unique needs.

For example, Lumosity will look at your performance in the games you played yesterday, then identify your strengths and weaknesses. You’ll receive more training on games that you’re weak at until you improve.

So if you’re bad at the fast arithmetic-type games, then Lumosity will throw those games at you until you improve.

The five different brain game categories include:

— Memory
— Attention
— Speed
— Flexibility
— Problem Solving

After signing up for Lumosity, you can start playing the games right away. You can play the games as part of your daily training routine. Or, if you want to put in some after-hours training, then you can also play the games outside of your training routine whenever you like.

The categories listed above actually get more specific. The “Memory” category, for example, gets broken down into four further categories that help you address specific problem areas of your memory, including:

— Recalling The Location Of Objects
— Remembering Names After The First Introduction
— Learning New Subjects Quickly And Accurately
— Keeping Track Of Several Ideas At The Same Time

The attention category, on the other hand, includes categories like “avoiding distractions” and “improving productivity and precision at work or home.”

The speed category contains categories like “reacting quickly” and “speeding up cognitive processes”

If you’re wondering what the Flexibility category is all about, you’ll find categories like “Thinking outside the box” and “Multi-tasking quickly and efficiently.”

There are games designed to meet each one of these specific categories.

When you first sign up for Lumosity, you’ll check the boxes beside all of the categories where you think you need to improve. The site will then deliver a training program designed to meet your unique needs.

Ultimately, your Lumosity training program isn’t that different from the training programs of other people. It’s not like you’re paying for a professional psychologist here. You get mostly the same games – you just get those games at different frequencies and in different orders. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because most of the games are pretty darn fun.

After you’ve completed your signup process, you can see how you compare against the average user. This can be a confidence-boosting moment – or it can be a devastating moment.

You’re ranked against others based on your BPI (Brain Performance Index, also known as Lumosity Performance Index or LPI). You’re also ranked based on speed, memory, attention, flexibility, and problem solving (the same categories listed above). You can see your rank in terms of percentile.

Over time, you can see how your BPI progresses as you get better and better at Lumosity games.

Once you’re ready to begin training, Lumosity will explain how each game is supposed to work and tell you which parts of your brain that game is supposed to improve.

Sample Lumosity Games

Some of the most popular Lumosity games include:

— Speed Match: Optimizes your information processing by forcing you to quickly decide if the object in front of you matches the object that you just saw a second ago. You press the right arrow for a match and the left arrow for a non-match (it’s like Brain Tinder!).

— Lost in Migration: This game testes your selective attention, which is your brain’s ability to pay attention to the things that matter most. You’ll see a flock of birds on the screen. One bird in that flock is pointing the wrong direction from the rest of the flock. You use your computer’s arrow keys to indicate where that bird is pointing while ignoring the direction of the other birds.

— Memory Match: Similar to Speed Match, Memory Match forces you to quickly decide whether or not two objects match each other while one of the objects fades away.

— Memory Matrix: Remember the patterns of colored blocks in a grid of non-colored blocks. This game focuses on building up your working memory capacity. You’ll see tiles in a particular pattern, and then the square will flip over to a blank square and you’ll be forced to click on the tiles that were colored.

— Familiar Faces: Remember the names of customers at a restaurant to win tips and job promotions over time. You type in each customer’s name as you go along (so you have to remember spelling as well).

How Much Does Lumosity Cost?

The company makes it easy to sign up for Lumosity. You start your brain training with a 3 day trial program. After that, you can decide whether or not you want to pay for the full program, which costs:

— $14.95 per month (billed month-to-month)

— $6.95 per month (billed annually, or $83.40 for the year)

— $4.99 per month (two year commitment, or $119.76 for the full two years)

— $299.95 for a lifetime subscription

About Lumosity

Lumosity’s official name is Lumos Labs, Inc. The company is headquartered in downtown San Francisco, California at the following address:

You can contact the company by email at [email protected]. The company’s CEO is named Kunal Sarkar.