Lumosity is popular, but its benefits are very limited. This article explains why.
In recent years, brain training has become a multimillion-pound business with companies such as Lumosity and Nintendo developing a wide range of user-friendly ‘brain games’ for the average punter. Lumosity, co-founded by Michael Scanlon after he abandoned his neuroscience PhD at Stanford University, California, has grown by 150% year-on-year since its launch in 2005 and now reaches millions of people worldwide. It is a major player in the market, and because people invest time and money into its subscription-based membership, it demands closer scrutiny to sort out the reality from the hype.
Evidence for training transfer to real life
According to the scientific consumer research group Sharpbrains, brain training only works when it results in transfer to real benefits in daily life. Lumosity develops skills in the games themselves, without transferring beyond the game to general cognitive benefits such as IQ, emotional regulation or decision-making. A large study published in the scientific journal Nature has recently shown that the more popular brain training apps such as Lumosity do not improve general cognitive ability. Skills on the specific exercises improve with practice, but these exercises do not result in general improvements in brain function. The study concluded:
There were absolutely no transfer effects…I think the expectation that practising a broad range of cognitive tasks to get yourself smarter is completely unsupported. Adrien Owen, Ph.D
Known conditions of effective brain training
Transfer only works when it meets these conditions (the quotes are from this article):
- Core brain training. To ensure broad cognitive transfer, the training must “exercise a core brain-based capacity or neural circuit identified to be relevant to real-life outcomes, such as executive attention, working memory, speed of processing and emotional regulation”. Core brain capacities are the basis of wide-ranging cognitive health and performance outcomes in real life.
- A minimum “dose” of 15 hours total, performed over 8 weeks or less, is necessary for real improvement. “Training only a few hours across a wide variety of brain functions…should not be expected to trigger real-world benefits, in the same way that going to the gym a couple times per month and doing an assortment of undirected exercises cannot be expected to result in increased muscle strength and physical fitness.”
In practice Lumosity training does not target core brain circuits (such as working memory) but consists more accurately in ‘an assortment of undirected exercises’. Moreover, the training on a given exercise is not sustained for 15 hours in a training regime. Failing to meet these basic conditions explains in large part why scientific reviews of Lumosity training fail to show transfer to general cognitive abilities like IQ, memory, decision making or emotional control. Without this kind of time commitment on core brain functions, brain training is little more than an exercise in vanity – or at best, like playing computer games or game apps on your mobile. Serious brain training is like going to the gym – it requires work over several weeks to lose weight and get ripped. But the long term benefits make it well worth the investment.
Evidence behind the credibility of Lumosity
If we take a look at the Lumosity website and get some familiarity with its brain training exercises, it’s the company gains credibility through:
- Being simple and (relatively) effortless
- Popularity & reviews
- Scientific research backing
Products are strategically marketed along these lines, and let’s look at why these criteria in themselves may not be trustworthy.
Simple & Effortless
Things that are easy to process (simple and effortless) give us a momentary burst of pleasure. One study showed that when people look at objects which are easy to pick up, they produce tiny smiles compared with when they are shown objects which are difficult to pick up. Extrapolate this to websites, products or whatever matters to you and the power of ‘easy-simple’ should be obvious. Also, when thinking about something that is easy to process, we tend to make judgments and decisions quickly and effortlessly – such as whether to trust something or buy something. And it is now known that products presented in a way that is simple and effortless sell better.
Now consider the easy-simple website content of the most popular brain training sites. And reflect on how easy-simple most of the popular brain training games are. A question you can ask yourself is: Is the known bias towards easy-simple influencing my evaluation of these providers or products? And another question is: Is this bias deliberately being tapped by these providers? Might it be better to slow down and really exercise my critical thinking here? We can see from the criteria of effective brain training that being easy & effortless generally works against real transfer of brain training to cognitive benefits in real life. Just like training to improve strength, fitness or endurance, the effective strategies to improve brain function involve sustained effort – over at least a month. Yes, brain training apps can be simple, but it should not be designed to simple to promote its popular appeal.
Popularity & Reviews
When undecided, we tend to follow the pattern of others. It is a well-known cognitive bias and is known to marketeers as ‘social proof‘. A choice that has been validated by our peers, is a ‘safe choice’ and is perceived as good. Brain training companies capitalize on this bias, by emphasizing the popularity and social value of the product in numerous ways – such as the claimed number of users, what real time users are posting, and any number of easily obtained recommendations. But as we saw above, popularity in the general public can be a negative sign – since only those applications that are simple and effortless tend to become popular in this way.
Scientific Research Backing
Scientific backing for brain training apps sounds credible, but ‘research’ comes in many guises, including:
- ‘In house’ research
- Conference talks and other non-published material
- Single peer-reviewed journal articles
- Meta-studies of multiple peer-reviewed journal articles
It turns out that only the last of these – independent meta review studies – is a reliable guide to the effectiveness of a brain training intervention. In house research is not independent research – it is conducted by the very company selling the product! Nor is it independently evaluated by academic peers. Taken alone, it’s worthless as a reliable guide to the effectiveness of a brain training product. If we take a look at a company like Lumosity, you can see how much in house research (‘Lumos Labs’) is claimed to back their own products – the majority of the ‘research’ – and generally for precisely those benefits that brain training users want! We have the same problem with conference talks which are not peer reviewed, even if they are independent. Single peer reviewed journal articles. Published, peer-reviewed articles are a better source of evidence. Peer-review means that independent experts have evaluated the paper and consider it worthy of publication in a particular scientific journal. However, single papers showing an effect are not conclusive in themselves. Why? Because many ‘effects’ shown in peer-reviewed scientific journals have been shown to vanish when they are replicated. This has been dubbed the ‘crisis of replication’ in psychology. As this Nature commentary notes:
“Psychologists are going through a period of intense self-reflection regarding the reliability of research in their field, fuelled by recently uncovered cases of fraud, failed attempts to replicate classic results, and calls from prominent psychologists to replicate key results in disputed fields.”
The small number of peer reviewed studies of Lumosity brain training apps are single, unreplicated (unrepeated) studies. Before these are repeated we should be wary of them. Moreover, the benefits reported are typically not for the general population but for specific groups such as cancer survivors or ‘girls with Turner syndrome’. So what should we trust? First we should demand replication – that is, repeats of the study in different labs, published in different journal articles. Second, we should trust systematic reviews and meta-studies rather than individual studies – reviews of multiple studies looking at the same effect. Popular brain training vendors simply do not provide this kind of evidence. Lumosity does not provide this standard of scientific evidence. IQ Mindware is designed to be effective based on attested principles, meeting the known conditions required for effective brain training.
Find out about these principles of effective brain training here.
