Nice design, but loses its luster quickly

Lumosity has a simple promise; play a few short games each day to exercise your cognitive abilities, and you’ll see benefits in your everyday life. This popular free “brain-training” app recently made its way to Android (it’s also available for iOS), and it gives you a way to, allegedly, polish your memory, attention, and information processing skills.

I say allegedly because the jury’s still out on whether these kinds of programs actually work to improve your brain function. Lumosity has a group of neuroscientists that develop the program, which is based on the concept of “neuroplasticity” — the idea that your brain changes over time. Those scientists have conducted research that shows that Lumosity works as promised, but other research into this area has had mixed results. So far there doesn’t seem to be much conclusive evidence that training with Lumosity or any other brain-training app does anything more than simply make you better at the games they make you play.

Since I can’t prove or disprove the science behind Lumosity’s program, my review instead focuses on using the app itself. Lumosity for Android is well designed, and gives you an easy way to exercise your brain for a few minutes each day. However, without a paid subscription (which I’ll touch on below), the program falls flat.

Get your brain baseline

Lumosity is a free service that you can use on the company’s desktop website, and its iOS and Android apps. To get started, you’ll first need a Lumosity account, which you can sign up for using Facebook or your email address.

For $12 per month (£10.50, AU$19), or $60 per year (£55, AU$100), you get access to all of the games in the Lumosity app and on the company’s website, plus you can compare your performance stats with others in the Lumosity community.

Lumosity promises to exercise your brain (pictures)
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When you first open the app, it gives you a survey that asks which skills you want to improve, such as remembering names or make faster decisions under pressure. Your answers help the app decide which games to give for your training. Then you can start your training sessions, and Lumosity keeps track of your progress in those skill areas after each training session.

It’s not obvious from the app, but if you want a little extra insight you can head to Lumosity’s website to take a brain test that gives you a baseline of your mental abilities that are exercised in the program. When I started testing Lumosity, I did a brain test and got a score of 102. For my age group (mid-20s), the average score is 100. I wasn’t able to retake the test during my review, because Lumosity recommends that you come back after 10 weeks of training to see how you improved.

The brain games

The app has a total of six games that test your memory, attention, problem-solving abilities, and mental flexibility, and Lumosity says it’s working on adding more. At any time, you can watch a tutorial that reminds you how to play each game, which is helpful. Here’s a brief run-down of each game:

• Chalkboard Challenge: A math game that gives you one number and one simple equation. You need to quickly complete the equation to get the answer and decide if the answer is higher than the other number, or if they’re equal.
• Ebb and Flow: Green and orange leaves move across a pond, and you have to swipe in the correct direction of where they are pointing or moving.
• Lost in Migration: A flock of five birds appears and you have to swipe in the direction that the middle bird is pointing, trying to ignore the other birds in the flock.
• Memory Matrix: You have to recreate a pattern of tiles after seeing it for just a few seconds. This is the only game that’s not timed.
• Speed Match: You’re shown a stream of cards with shapes on them, and have to identify if the current card has the same shape as the one right before it.
• Spatial Speed Match: This game is just like Speed Match, but the cards have patterns of dots instead of simple shapes.