Lumosity Aversion

When I am online, I am constantly greeted by ads for a website called Lumosity. It’s annoying. Lumosity supposedly trains your brain so you can function better.

Brain Training? Ow.

This is from their website: “At Lumos Labs, we believe in improving brains—and lives. That’s why we created a simple online tool to allow anyone to achieve their full potential. Several studies have shown that Lumosity can improve cognitive function in various populations.”

They are “a leader in the science of brain training”!

You know, something about this feels kind of self-indulgent to me. It also makes me think of how people go around eating a whole pizza and two pints of ice cream for dinner and then go to the gym at 10:00 at night in a pointless attempt to try to run off the cheese, bread, pepperoni, and cookie dough on a treadmill. 

I’d rather try to use my mind in my regular life so that it doesn’t need a late-night online gym involving no productive outcome in order to fix it.

Still, I wanted to be fair and not pre-judge, so I went on the Lumosity site and took a couple of assessments and promptly went loopy with impatience. I had to look for matching patterns and click things and unmatching patterns and click other things and then remember patterns and re-create them by…clicking more things.

Within about 15 minutes I left their site and went back to studying Arabic.

I believe in maintaining brain function. I am totally in favor of brain function. But I’d really rather have it integrated into life functions than be something I have to do separately as a self-conscious self-improvement method.

Dear scientists, please tell me which works better: Lumosity or Arabic?