Lumosity is an online brain training and neuroscience research company based in San Francisco, California.
Lumosity offers a brain training program consisting of more than 40 games in the areas of memory,
attention, flexibility, speed of processing, and problem solving.
In mid-2013, the company had around 90 employees.
History Lumosity was founded in 2005 by Kunal Sarkar,
Michael Scanlon and David Drescher.
Lumosity.com launched in 2007 and, as of November 2013, has over 50 million members.
Lumosity’s mobile app has been downloaded more than 10 million times and "is often at
the top of the Apple iTunes Store’s educational-gaming category."
Financials The company raised $400,000 in capital from
angel investors in 2007, a Series A of $3 million from Harrison Metal Capital, FirstMark
Capital and Norwest Venture Partners in 2008, a Series C of $32.5 million led by Menlo Ventures,
and a Series D of $31.5 million led by Discovery Communications with participation from existing
investors.
Effectiveness There is no scientific consensus on the benefits
of brain training for medical conditions in the clinical environment.
Studies of Lumosity's effectiveness have shown mixed results.
Some have shown benefits from the use of Lumos Labs cognitive training:
Dr. Shelli Kesler and colleagues at Stanford University found improved cognitive performance
and corresponding increases in brain activity in the pre-frontal cortex in survivors of
childhood cancer following training with Lumosity.
Participants who trained with Lumosity showed significantly improved processing speed, cognitive
flexibility, verbal and visual declarative memory scores.
Kesler et al. demonstrated enhanced math skills and cognitive performance with corresponding
changes in brain activity in individuals with Turner syndrome following training with Lumosity.
Kesler et al. found that women whose breast cancer had been treated with chemotherapy
demonstrated improved executive function, such as cognitive flexibility, verbal fluency
and processing speed after Lumosity training.
This work is published in Clinical Breast Cancer.
Psychologist Maurice Finn and Skye McDonald from the University of New South Wales found
that patients with mild cognitive impairment who trained with Lumosity improved their sustained
attention relative to controls.
MCI is considered a precursor condition to Alzheimer’s disease, and this is the first
report of cognitive enhancement with training in this population.
Mayas and Colleagues found a significant reduction of distraction and an increase of alertness
in eldery healthy adults after 20 one-hour training sessions using Lumosity in comparison
to a control group.
The authors conclude that these results suggest neurocognitive plasticity in the old human
brain.
However, other studies that did not use Lumosity had mixed results.
"[T]here is no scientific evidence to support a range of manufacturers' claims [including
Lumosity's] that the gadgets can help improve memory or stave off the risk of illnesses
such as dementia."
A careful attempt to replicate the preliminary experimental results on which this enterprise
is based found no effect from the training.
Some have noted that the clinical trials cited on their website show that studies conducted
used a very small sample size and that the methodology section fails to clearly explain
how control groups were handled.
Other studies have failed to demonstrate generalizable benefits of brain training.
References
External links Official website
Lumosity on Facebook Lumosity on Twitter
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