Pump Up Your Brainpower from Anywhere!

If you’re dreading the boredom of waiting in those long holiday lines, then we have exciting news for you — Lumosity is going mobile! For only 99 cents, you can download our first brain training iPhone application – Speed Brain.  You’ll now be able to have fun and sharpen your mind wherever you are.

Speed Brain is the first Lumosity game available to iPhone users. Designed to improve your processing speed and reaction time, Speed Brain tasks your ability to quickly and accurately determine whether a symbol matches the last one that you saw.

And because Speed Brain is offered by Lumosity, you can feel confident that it’s one of the few scientifically-based brain fitness mobile applications created with heavy involvement from doctors, neuroscientists, and psychologists at universities worldwide, including Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, Columbia, and UCSF.

Ready for your mobile mental workout?

Download Speed Brain by clicking here:

Here’s a preview of what you’ll see:

We hope you think that Speed Brain is a healthy addition to your iPhone! If you have any feedback, we always appreciate hearing it.

Coming soon: a sparkling new Lumosity!

The Lumos Labs team is excited to announce that in the next few weeks Lumosity is getting an upgraded look and lots of new features. We don’t want to spoil the surprise, but keep a watch out for new ways to understand and compare your brain performance, easier navigation, and more helpful tips about how Lumosity can make your life better.

You’ll be getting a sneak peek of new game designs starting next week! We’d love to hear what you think at games@lumoslabs.com.

Exercising Executive Function

Think you’re good at multitasking? Many people believe they get more done by doing several things at once, but usually they’re wrong. Every time you switch to a different activity, you must give up a moment to shift your attention to the new task at hand. Overall, doing more than one thing slows you down.

While it’s a good idea to avoid multitasking in your day-to-day activities, some multitasking is simply unavoidable. So, we’ve designed Brain Shift to help you become better at efficiently switching between different activities. You should still avoid multitasking when possible, but we hope this exercise will make you better at it for those times when you must.

You can find Brain Shift here: http://games.lumosity.com/brain_shift.html

Let us know what you think!

Brain Exercise: Memory Matrix

Brain exercise - Memory Matrix

This new exercise will work your memory for spatial layouts and object pattern recognition. We’re still putting the final touches on it, so please send us your feedback so we can keep making it better.

You can find Memory Matrix here: http://games.lumosity.com/memory_matrix.html

myBrain Application Launches on Facebook

Lumosity just launched the myBrain games on Facebook, bringing you more ways to train your brain and get social with friends.

Install myBrain to:

• Get a brain profile
• Improve your brain health
• Challenge friends
• See how you stack up

Install the app by following this link: myBrain

(This link will take you to the Lumosity application on Facebook. You will need a Facebook account to get your brain profile.)

Brain Game: By the Rules

This new exercise will work your mental flexibility, logical problem solving, and working memory abilities. We’re still putting the final touches on it, so send us your feedback so we can keep making it better.

You can find By the Rules here: http://games.lumosity.com/by_the_rules.html

Older People Learning Newer Tricks

By Gregory Kellett, a cognitive neuroscience researcher at SFSU and UCSF, and science writer for Lumos Labs.

Recent research coming out of Hamburg, Germany and published in the Journal of Neuroscience demonstrates that older brains still have the flexibility to literally grow. Researcher Janina Boyke and crew, split 50 people with an average age of 60 years into two groups. One half of the participants were trained in the fine art of juggling over the course of 3 months while the other half was not. Three MRI brain scans were taken: one before the juggling began, another after 3 months of juggling training and a yet a third after 3 months of no juggling.

The data revealed that:

• The juggling group showed significant increases in brain gray matter above the non-juggling controls. These increases took place in the hippocampus (responsible for memory formation), the nucleus accumbens (involved in reward systems) and various visual centers.

• Three months after the end of training none of the individuals from the juggling group could still juggle and the gray matter increases had declined back to baseline. (Can you say “Use it or lose it“)

The authors note the growth of the nucleus accumbens (involved in reward systems) to be of particular interest, suggesting that it may have been involved in “…turning reward information into motivated action”.

Surgical Gaming

By Gregory Kellett, a cognitive neuroscience researcher at SFSU and UCSF, and science writer for Lumos Labs.

Video game play seems to be related to better surgical skills according to research showcased at the recent Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association.

Iowa State University psychologist Douglas Gentile, PhD, ran an experiment looking at the video game experience of 33 budding surgeons and how this related to performance during surgical training.

The numbers showed that:

• Past video game play in excess of 3 hrs/wk correlated with 37% fewer errors and a 27% increase in speed (over non-video-game players) during training exercises.

• Video game skill (as measured by high scores) were a significant predictor of demonstrated surgical skills.

Although this doesn’t necessarily translate as cause and effect, it seems plausible that exercising fine motor control, visual attention processing, reaction time, hand-eye coordination and 2-dimensional depth perception might just improve one’s ability to wield a scalpel.

References:

Rosser, J. C., Lynch, P. J., Cuddihy, L., Gentile, D. A., Klonsky, J., & Merrell, R. (2007). The Impact of Video Games on Training Surgeons in the 21st Century. Arch Surg, 142(2), 181-186.

Dorval, M., & Pépin, M. (1986). Effect of playing a video game on a measure of spatial visualization. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 62(1), 159-62.