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February 11, 2013
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Lumosity.com proves useful in tricking training
Your brain is important right? Well, duh. So that
must mean that keeping the health of your brain
in check is important.
If someone told you a device exists that helps you become
smarter just by playing games, would you believe
her? I’m that girl telling you that Lumosity.com is the
way to go when it comes to improving or maintaining
the brain’s health. Because, let’s face it, even after three
days of training, even I learned how to shark the system.
Lumosity.com is a website with lots of features to
improve your brain’s function. It does more than offer
games to play. It also records your brain performance
index (BPI), the measurement Lumosity.com uses to
track your cognitive performance and improvement.
All the features offered on the free
side of Lumosity.com are
the uncomplicated tools needed
to improve brain health.
However, there are pros and cons to this website.
Lumosity.com categorizes the areas in which it can
help improve your BPI. These categories are memory,
attention, speed, flexibility and problem solving. When
you start your brain training, Lumosity.com asks you
which of those areas you would like to improve. You can
pick one or all of them.
After you have told Lumosity.com what areas of your
brain you want to improve, it starts you off with games
that address each category. The games change each day
you train.
For instance, Luminosity.com started me with three
memory games that helped with speed and attention.
On my second day of training it gave me two memory
games that helped improve attention and flexibility as
well as a problem solving game.
Each day, the training program or games are different.Luminosity.com
also gives users information on
which categories your training games address. It offers
recommendations and scores from when the user previously
played the game.
graphics editor
Char Lessenger
When the user has finished playing a game, the
website gives a statistics page for that game, addressing
reaction time, accuracy, total number correct and points
earned followed by the overall score, the game BPI, the
user’s top scores and how many Lumosity points the
user has earned.
Lumosity points are a measurement of how much
and how well the user has trained. It also gives recommendations
from other Lumosity trainers and saves the
statistics for later reference.
Lumosity also offers a brain profile. What the brain
profile boils down to is a sum of the user’s activity. It
includes overall BPI, the BPI a user has earned for each
category, Lumosity points, the user’s best brain areas
and a small graph of your training history improvement
over time. It’s a very simple page of statistics.
The downside of Lumosity.com is it’s not a totally free
site. In order to unlock all its features,
you would have to pay a monthly,
yearly, semiannual or even a lifetime
fee. Lumosity.com leads users to
believe that unlocking these features
is necessary, which really isn’t true.
Users can get all the brain training and
improvement needed without paying
for the extra services.
At first look, every game Lumosity
offers is locked unless paid for. This
fact was initially frustrating, but I
found that all the games offered for free
editor’s
commentary
during training were the same games the site had locked
under the games tab.
This epiphany, I guess you could say, was my “stickit-to-the-man”
moment. I realized that users can play all
those games that are locked through the training games
it gives you each day for free. You just have to be patient.
This actually turns out to be a good thing because instead
of being overwhelmed with all the games, you can
choose to play or not to play, or to pay or not to pay for,
Lumosity chooses those games for you in your day-today
training. Only patience is required to play each of
the locked games it unlocks for you in your free training.
The other slightly unpleasant downfall was
Luminosity.com doesn’t have a mobile app for Android.
The site has one for Apple products so outrageously
expensive, I don’t even want to talk about it. Because
Android’s market share is much higher than Apple’s, it
should be a “no-brainer” to have an Android app, which
should come free to subscribers to Luminosity.com
whether they pay for Lumosity’s services.
Overall, the pros outweigh the cons on the unrestricted
side of Lumosity.com. Don’t buy into paying for these
services because, the “extras” are unnecessary. This
easily navigated site provides statistics to “maul” over, if
you’re curious.
All the features offered on the free side of Lumosity.
com are the uncomplicated and rudimentary tools
needed to improve brain health. I know this because
after just three days of training with the free side of
Lumosity.com, I figured out how to trick the system and
get all I need for free. Thank you, Lumosity.com.
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