So what does all this mean for you?

As you play some of our newer Lumosity games, you may notice adjustments to your overall BPI, brain area BPIs (such as Memory and Attention), attribute BPIs (such as Visual Field and Focus) as well as individual game BPI histories. For example, playing Memory Match Overload will now affect your BPI for that individual game as well as for the larger categories it is a part of. Lumosity subscribers can check their Memory Match Overload BPI history at any time by logging into lumosity.com, accessing “Your Profile,” clicking on the “History” tab,  selecting “Memory,” clicking the “Working Memory” attribute, and choosing “Memory Match Overload” from the drop-down box. Because Memory Match Overload is a Working Memory game, playing it will affect the BPI for the Working Memory attribute and the more expansive Memory category, as well as your overall BPI. You can check your category and attribute BPI history from the History section within “Your Profile.”

Don’t be discouraged if your overall BPI drops a bit after playing one of our newer games: like all Lumosity activities, practice will lead to improvement, and eventually, a higher BPI. We’ll be integrating games into our BPI system during the upcoming weeks, starting with Memory Match Overload.

Rotation Matrix will be coming next; it’s a challenging game, so you might want to practice it a bit before we include it in the BPI system! We’ll make sure to update this post each time we add another game to our BPI system, so keep checking back!

And as always, if you’re curious about how we calculate BPI scales, or could use a refresher, you can learn more about it here.

Can you actually become more intelligent?  For years, neuroscientists thought that this basically didn’t happen.  According to this view, you can take in more information and learn new things, but you can’t really become “more intelligent.”  Recent research conducted by scientists at the University of Michigan shows that this old view is probably dead wrong.

Susanne Jaeggi, Martin Buschkuehl, and their colleagues at Michigan did a study looking at what happens when people play a challenging working memory task called Dual N-Back.  They found that after training on this task for 25 minutes a day for a few weeks, the young adults in their study actually scored much better on tests of fluid intelligence – the ability to creatively solve new problems.  Fluid intelligence is part of standard IQ tests, so we can say that these subjects actually increased their intelligence following this training.

The Dual N-Back training is now available (free for a limited time) on Lumosity!  We have worked closely with Dr. Jaeggi and Dr. Buschkuehl to create a version of the Dual N-Back training that replicates what was used in their earlier study.  And, we’re going to support their ongoing research by hosting the program which will be used in their studies of intelligence training going forward.

Try it for yourself, but be warned: this training is not for the faint of heart. It’s hard! But the effort is worth it. After you’ve started, why not share your experiences with other users in our dual n-back forum?

Give it a try and send some feedback our way; it’s free to all members for a limited time only!

From a cognitive perspective, “planning” can actually involve several brain attributes, including working memory, spatial recall, and logical reasoning. With all of these things in play, it’s no wonder that choosing your next few moves in a game of chess can seem like a monumental task.

That’s why we’ve designed Route to Sprout, a new game that challenges you to move a seed to its planting hole using the most efficient path you can find. If you take the time to figure out the optimal route, you’ll earn extra points and give your planning skills a workout at the same time.

Give it a try, and let us know what you think!

The human brain is quite remarkable. It does not remain static, but instead ceaselessly changes throughout life. Everything you learn or experience impacts the biology of your brain.

Though some cognitive abilities typically begin to decline in the third decade of life, cortical plasticity renews our hope that new connections can be willfully forged. For example, there was a little girl who was born with very little cortical tissue. Doctors did not see much of a future for her because she did not have a “normal” brain; however, because of cortical plasticity and the brain’s ability to reorganize itself, she learned to function quite well (Distelmaier et al., 2007).

The article highlighted that this “case teaches us that clinicians and parents should not give up in the face of an apparently hopeless case!”

In a previous post, Almost No Brain, a man managed to lead a normal life despite having minimal gray matter inside his skull. These two cases show how amazingly adaptable the brain is. The ability to shift the nature-nurture tension toward the nurture side is empowering for us, and provides hope even in the face of serious abnormalities of the brain.

References:
Distelmaier et al., “How Much Brain Is Really Necessary?” A Case of Complex Cerebral Malformation and Its Clinical Course, J Child Neurol 2007; 22; 756

Special thanks to Bradley Voytek, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, Berkeley, for his assistance.

Palm selects Lumosity to bring the first brain training game to the Palm Pre.

Designed to improve your processing speed and reaction time, Speed Brain exercises your ability to quickly understand information and react to it. You can also connect to your Lumosity account on your Palm Pre, which will allow you to track your Lumosity Brain Profile.

As with other Lumosity games, Speed Brain for webOS was created with heavy involvement from doctors, neuroscientists, and psychologists at universities worldwide.

Search for “Speed Brain” in the Palm Pre App Catalog.

We hope our Palm Pre users will enjoy their brain training on the go!

It seems that working memory training may work by physically altering the brain. Stockholm Brain Institute researchers put healthy people through working memory exercises for 35 minutes per day over a period of 5 weeks. Changes in dopamine receptor density were measured with positron emission tomography (PET) before and after the training.

Following working memory training, they found:

• An increase in the density of dopamine receptors.
• An improvement in working memory performance.

The neurotransmitter dopamine plays a central role in working memory. This research implies that improving working memory performance through several weeks of training might work by increasing the quantity of dopamine receptors in the brain.

References:
Buschkuehl, M., Jaeggi, S. M., Hutchison, S., Perrig-Chiello, P., Däpp, C., Müller, M., et al. (2008). Impact of working memory training on memory performance in old-old adults. Psychology and Aging, 23(4), 743-53.

Dahlin, E., Neely, A. S., Larsson, A., Bäckman, L., & Nyberg, L. (2008). Transfer of learning after updating training mediated by the striatum. Science (New York, N.Y.), 320(5882), 1510-2.

McNab, F., Varrone, A., Farde, L., Jucaite, A., Bystritsky, P., Forssberg, H., et al. (2009). Changes in cortical dopamine D1 receptor binding associated with cognitive training. Science (New York, N.Y.), 323(5915), 800-2.

And because we’re so eager for you to play Memory Matrix, it’s going to be FREE — for a limited time — so take advantage of this offer and download it today!

Also, for those of you who downloaded our first mobile game (Speed Brain), you’ll notice that we’ve added new features to our mobile games, including the ability to sync to your lumosity.com account.  Now you can take your brain profile with you wherever you go!  Track your progress from anywhere and show your friends and family how much you’ve improved.

We hope you give Memory Matrix a whirl.  We think you’ll find it challenging and fun!

Well Lumos Labs has devised a new brain game to help you avoid those embarrassing situations. Its called Familiar Faces, and as the title implies, it involves remembering people’s faces, along with their names and food orders. Big tips and job promotions are the goal, and those are achieved by improving your service with practice.

Keeping in mind who ordered what will exercise both your working memory and attention, while possibly helping to make your social life a tad more comfortable. Check it out, and as always, feel free to give us your feedback.

A new study indicates that focusing too much might actually diminish your ability to pay attention. The researchers, based out of Carnegie Mellon University, used a phenomenon called the attentional blink as the center of their investigation.

An attentional blink is a deficit in visual attention which often occurs 200-500 milliseconds after the first of two visual items are presented during an experiment. The study looked at the ability of participants to detect that second visual item in the presence of visual distractions (moving grey dots).

Surprisingly, the distractors enhanced the ability of people to detect items often obscured by attentional blinks.

The authors hypothesize that the attentional blink phenomenon is due to an overexertion of control happening when target detection and memory consolidation overlap.

They surmise that the adding of distractors dissipates this overexertion of control, thereby enhancing performance.

So the next time you’re playing Speed Match you may want to try day dreaming a bit…it just might improve your score.

References:
Taatgen, N. A., Juvina, I., Schipper, M., Borst, J. P., & Martens, S. (n.d.). Too much control can hurt: A threaded cognition model of the attentional blink. Cognitive Psychology, In Press, Corrected Proof.

Salvucci, D. D., & Taatgen, N. A. (2008). Threaded cognition: An integrated theory of concurrent multitasking. Psychological
Review, 115(1), 101–130.