Am I Smarter Yet ? Two Years Of Lumosity

A few years ago, feeling like it was taking me longer to recall facts or names than it used to, I decided that I needed to do something every day to keep myself sharp.  I’d been thinking of taking up crosswords, or Sudoku, something that I could do that wouldn’t take too much time. And it was in this context that I came across Lumosity. If you haven't heard of it, Lumosity is a subscription service where you complete a number of small puzzle games each day, structured around focus areas that you’re working on like attention, speed and memory. The site claims that doing these puzzles broadly improves your cognitive function. I’ve built Lumosity exercises into my daily morning routine for the last couple of years. It’s sometimes tough to motivate myself to do the five suggested exercises every morning, but most of the time I manage to do it, and it doesn’t normally take more than about ten minutes.

Recently it came time to resubscribe. I decided to figure out if the training really was having any impact. Is my ten-minute-a-day Lumosity habit actually making me a smarter, sharper person ? Does tracing a frog across a screen or trying to follow a twisting, turning set of leaves actually have an effect ? Turns out this is a controversial subject - a quick Google search puts the case both ways. Placing the larger questions aside, and whether cognitive elasticity is a real thing, what I really wanted to answer was whether this ten minutes a day is having a positive effect. I started by trying to get to a quantitative answer.

One of the things that I like about Lumosity is that it keeps records of your training history, your game scores and the trends over time: 

(Apparently I was super-sharp on July 17th …) 

LPI (Lumosity Performance Index) is the overall metric that Lumosity uses to measure your progress, both against the focus areas that the site concentrates on and as an aggregated total. As you can see, I made startling improvements to begin with but have been improving more slowly for the last eighteen months or so: 

At least from the numbers alone, it seems like I’m at least trending in the right direction.

Of course the big question is whether I actually got better in real life in any of the areas that the games are supposed to impact, or whether I just got better at playing the games. Frankly, I don’t really know the answer to this, but I do think that it is having a positive impact in at least some specific areas. One of the games that comes up most frequently is all about remembering names and faces, and I’ve noticed that I seem to be better at this than I was a couple of years ago – if there’s a room full of people, I don’t find myself struggling to remember names as much as I used to. Playing that game has forced me to come up with a system to remember these details. A couple of the games require you to focus on a single item on the screen as the context changes, and I seem to be a bit more effective at spotting details in a busy environment than I used to be. Coincidence ? I’m really not sure. But even if I just think that I’m better at it, maybe that’s enough and worth the price of entry.

The data has taught me a few other things. By recording how much sleep that I’ve had against the ‘on the day’ LPI, it seems that I actually concentrate better if I’m slightly tired. Maybe being tired means that I better block out the world around me. Also, it would seem that I’m at my intellectual peak on a Tuesday or Wednesday. Mondays ? Apparently I’m not good then. 

And, most reassuringly, even if I think that I’m slowing down, apparently I’m doing okay compared to most of the people around me:

So, has it been worth the time and (modest) cost ? At least for me, the answer is yes. Even if the progress isn’t real, even thinking that I’m sharper is making me more confident. And that alone is worth the effort involved.