I'd like some chicken wings ... for my BRAIN
So I’m now entering my third week in my exploration of Lumosity, as well as my looking into brain games as a whole genre. I have gotten an account and used it to the extent I could before my free trial ran out. I have played every memory boosting, facial recognizationalizing, directional cognitive upside down birds game that they have on the site, and added a few ‘friends’ along the way (including a user named Rottweiler whose user picture is — guess what — a rottweiler!) I have gotten in touch with other users, including girl who claims to use the site to help her regain her cognitive functions after a debilitating car crash. Moreover, I have contacted the creators of the product in requesting a press kit — though I still have to hear back from them. I have also started my exploration of articles, etc, that support or refute brain gaming — most seem to vaguely endorse it with the backing of a handful of scientific studies.
First, though, some interesting observations and conclusions that I’ve come to over the past couple weeks:
- Lumosity.com is a product, not a service, and as such this affects their business/operational model. You want to use lumosity to the full extent, you pay monies. This differs from some of the other class travelogues in that they concern services as opposed to products. This, I think, ties into our discussion of google, chacha, skype, etc — things that people think that they deserve to have for free. Anyway, I thought that was an interesting distinction to notice — which is why the tone of the website seemed sort of off at first.
- The site is devoid of advertising, and is ‘partners’ with all of the top media outlets (New York Times, USA today — basically everybody), leading me to think that they themselves advertise with them. Moreover, every bit of literature featured on the site would naturally serve the function of selling the product and its brand image, and therefore should be taken as such.
- Aside from the ability to add and delete other users as ‘friends,’ you have absolutely no on-site way of contacting the other users. And it has been that way for a year or so, with no immediate sign of changing. There is no public sphere on Lumosity. —– THOUGH, I have been able to get in contact with a couple of users who posted their email addresses into their user profiles. I posted my personal email address in my user profile, but have not been contacted by anyone.
- The games are challenging, and you perform much better if you switch your brain into an active mode of participation. I didn’t even know I could do that until I started playing some of the games and noticed how much better I did if I exerted even the tiniest bit of strategic effort. NOT something I ever have to do on tetrisfriends.com. SO, if my tone thusfar is critical or antagonistic, I do want to note that they do have a fairly streamlined product that would seem to accomplish its goals in this respect. I am trying to figure out how to rephrase my final travelogue so it’s not so critical.
Anyway, I’ll go through this in greater detail later, but my love thang with Lumosity began with my making a user profile on their site, effectively signing up for their free trial. After 
confirming my email address, etc, I was immediately prompted to select the areas that I wished to improve. Badminton skill and sexual stamina weren’t options, so I indicated that I would like to boost my IQ and be a more creative thinker — as well as improve the areas of attention, memory, and fluid intelligence. The options that I was given didn’t really mean a whole lot to me — they all sounded like good things to work on, and were pretty abstract, so I didn’t put a lot of thought into this aspect. They asked if I was planning in taking any standardized tests (no), and what my profession was. I said ‘other’ only because I didn’t notice at the time that ‘student’ was the first option. Maybe my brain was moldier than I thought.
After this, I was presented with my ‘training.’ From what I gathered, the training and curriculum that was provided by the free trial was basically a system set up to present me with a series of games that targeted my indicated areas. Thus began my gaming.
In my final, I’ll go into a lengthier description of a sampling of the games I played. For now,
Birdwaching -- a combination between hangman and the hunting game in the original Oregon Trail
just know that they were fun-ish, only slightly addictive, and got challenging really quickly. One of my favorites to play was a face-recognition one where you had to memorize people’s names and type in their name in greeting each time they came to order food from you. You also had to remember a string of orders and imput that, and then repeat the person’s name when you said good bye. By the end of it, I realized that I had a serious issue of mixing up Richard and Robert, and had a mini crush on Ari (the pretty one!) and was terrified of Williams icy oriental stare. This game had a direct relationship to my job — and it managed to inspire the panic that I feel at the workplace, which in turn caused me to actually put forth effort into memorizing people’s names. (William looked so disapproving to begin with — couldn’t let him down!)
Enter Raven. Raven was a user I found by chance from the presumably real-time newsfeed on the side 
of the home page that lists users’ scores in various games. In her profile, she listed herself as a victim of an awful car crash (I found several like her on the site), and listed her email address, inviting other users to get in contact with her if they had any questions. I emailed her, telling her about our class and the way our travelogues work, and she replied quickly — thus beginning our curious correspondence. She opened her letter, sans salutation, with the following:
April 24, 2010 I got into a really severe car accident (I can send you the list of injuries and pictures if you would like) but among my injuries I had two different types of brain injuries. I had a moderate Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), which means my brain was bleeding, it was bleeding mostly on the right. My other brain injury was a Diffuse Axonal Injury (DAI), meaning my brain tissue rubbed against itself and knocked out all connections (90% of people with these injuries don’t regain consciousness and the 10% that do, are severely impaired. This is the same thing as Shaking Baby Syndrome), it affects the whole brain. I started using Lumosity after I came home from the hospital a month after my wreck.
On Monday, the 25th, I’ll actually be starting cognitive therapy with my neuro psych. I’ve been healing incredibly well. I lost completely all of my memory, I didn’t even recognize my own parents and still don’t remember much about my life or family. I have short term and long term memory loss. However, my memory loss is nothing like how they describe it in movies, my short term is just below average, but my long term is pretty bad and that’s anything after 4 hours. With the severity of my brain injuries it’s a miracle that I’m even able to function at all!
Though I was curious as to how she was able to ‘function’ enough to correspond with me via email, I didn’t ask R any more about her injuries, instead focusing on her relationship with the website. I’ll expand on this correspondence later on — but needless to say I ended up asking her if she was affiliated with the website in any way just for safety’s sake. She indicated that she was not, but directed me to the website’s ‘contact us’ page. (I have, and have yet to hear back from them).
I also got in contact with another user, O, who in his user profile claimed to use the site to improve his brain for the SAT’s. We had a brief email exchange in which he seemed to be slightly critical of Lumosity. It was pretty enlightening — and though Lumosity seems an obscure venue, I got the feelng that he might have been using the site and posting his email address on it to make online friends.
As noted, all of the articles I’ve found thusfar involving brain games are usually reports on this or that study that supports the ‘use it or lose it’ philosophies regarding brain function. A few of them reference scientific studies where they indicate that brain gaming specifically can help improve brain function. I would like to further this exploration, and perhaps find some if any that are critical of this. Are there real-world alternatives to brain gaming? I recall at some point reading that people who do puzzles have improved brain performance, so I’ll probably end up exploring this vein too.
I’ve also peeked my head into issues of neuroplasticity — learning a lot from this NOVA video on youtube.