
#Luminosity brain app how to
And we aren’t completely lost when it comes to the brain, Anguera adds-we just need to figure out how to effectively target the areas of the brain that we know are important. It needs to be directed toward a specific group of people with a specific condition.” Doing that, he says, requires effort not just on the part of research scientists, but also on the companies themselves. The key, he says, is that the game needs to target the right cognitive processes-in the right population-to help with specific deficits. So according to Kable and his colleagues, there clearly was some room for improvement.Īnguera says the other problem could be that the training was not specific enough to cause a change. However, all three groups-including the video game group and the control-improved in much the same way.

Joseph Kable, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania and lead author of the study, says that with a group this narrow, it’s possible that the participants were already functioning at such a high level that they couldn’t get much benefit out of the brain training. First, it was done in a very specific group: young, healthy people without any pre-existing conditions that might affect their memory. That’s what this study tried to accomplish, he says, but it still left a lot of questions unanswered. But the fact that you can kick Mario’s butt doesn’t mean you are going to do better in school or kick your smoking habit. The more you play Mario Kart, the better you are going to be at it. In fact, the researchers also gave a third group-who didn’t receive any training at all-the same cognitive tests, and those participants improved about as much as the game players. Both of them did indeed improve by the end of the study, but their improvements were, on average, exactly the same.
#Luminosity brain app series
Before and after the 10-week period, the researchers gave them a series of cognitive tests to see how well each group would do. The other, the control group, played video games for 10 weeks.

One group received 10 weeks of training with Lumosity. In this specific study, the researchers split up a group of 128 young adults into two sets. The neuroscientist-designed tool has been put to use by some of the most important researchers on the planet thanks to the personalized approach it provides for every person that uses it. Scientists still need to do more research to figure out which circuits are actually associated with different behaviors, and it will take even more research to figure out whether certain exercises can help. Lumosity, the leader in brain-training science, brings you a mobile app to train your memory and concentration with fun daily exercises. It could be that one app on the market does help improve one certain type of brain behavior, but we just haven’t pinned those results down yet. The thing about Lumosity (and other brain training games and apps), says Joaquin Anguera, an assistant professor of neurology at the University of San Francisco School of Medicine who was not involved in the study, is that there are a number of different modules and games to choose from-and all of them work different neural networks in the brain. But here’s the problem: There’s still a lot we don’t know about neuroscience and brain circuitry.
