Lumosity.com is an online site and product that acts as a platform for ‘brain games’ — all part of what they call a “scientifically designed brain fitness program.” This consists of a collection of in-house made games, each the culmination of research and development conducted by a group that calls themselves ‘Lumos Labs.‘ The site has been active since 2005, and purports almost 7 million users. ‘Brain gaming’ is a relatively new online presence, peaking in popularity around three or four years ago. My exploration of this aspect of new media entailed the following: becoming a member of and interacting with the Lumosity site, surveying it as a possible social platform, interacting with other users (through means outside of the site), attempting to talk to developers–and lastly looking through the site from a wider new media perspective. Moreover, this involved research into outside articles and perspectives on brain gaming, such as those that either supported to brought into question the legitimacy of this phenomena.
It became clear early on that Lumosity is an online product, as opposed to a service — and their business and operational model bore the affects of this. Though they offer a handful of their flash games for free to the casual user, it is clear that if you want to use the site to its full extent, you have to shell out the scrilla. And it’s not a neglegible expense either — monthly memberships run at around $15, yearly at $8 per month, two years at $5 a month, and $300 for a lifetime membership. In class and through many of you guys’ travelogues, I think we’ve found ourselves dealing a lot with the seen and unseen dynamics of free online services like chacha (expose courtesy of Jolie), google-everything, skype, etc. As far as I could tell, those services hinge upon gaining something out of our use of products that we think should be free of charge. Be it information for indivdiualized marketing or even just your cell phone number. Anyway, what Lumosity presents in particular is in a markedly different category. Though it can’t be said for sure what they do or do not use your information for, I thought it would be relevant to include this as it does apply to our class discussions. Overall, Lumosity’s service seems to provide a product that is something like a combination between a self-help book and mobile phone service.
Most of the information I could find on brain fitness and gaming kept things in the pop-neurology realm of things–garnering its information from the kinds of scientific studies that translate smoothly into interesting news reports. For example, there’s this NOVA mini-documentary discussing brain fitness and plasticity, and this one also produced by PBS — all of which is summed up (ad nauseam) in the mantra ‘use it or lose it.’ The idea behind brain fitness is that by working out certain areas of the brain — those that ‘atrophy’ when confronted with a predictable lifestyle, routine, and consistent lack of stimulation. Thus, in getting older, one must USE IT OR LOSE IT. If these youtube clips are any indication (especially the NOVA one), then it would seem that these exposes are tapping the Great American Fear of Aging. In the same way that one should fear with mania balding, wrinkles, or cellulite, one should also be afraid of being the curator of a soggy, slow brain. In this sense, I would want to point out that this is an interesting instance in which widespread cultural obsessions and fears have been the inspiration for new constructs within new media. Emily’s travelogue on online weight loss/monitoring communities is a perfect example of this.
Anyway, for me things with Lumosity began when I found I recently took a look at one of the sponsored stories on Digg, How Brain Training can Make You Significantly Smarter, which talked about how certain scientific studies have proven that playing online games that put your nog to work DO have a measurable positive outcome (students’ math scores went up 34%, people reported not feeling as dumb and also happier, etc etc). The article basically functioned as an advert for Lumosity, which offers free trial memberships for its ‘Premium’ services. So I signed up. 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 improving my creative thinking — 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. The games were simple in concept, usually requiring only a sentence or two of direction. However, they tended to get difficult the longer you played — downright challenging at times. Personally I noticed that I did much better when I
Memory Matrix: remember where the red blocks are. It gets impossible after a while.
switched to an active, as opposed to passive, 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. There were some games that required you do basic math functions at faster and faster rates — a surefire challenge for those of us who managed to squeak by without ever learning our multiplication tables. There were other games that required more strategy — rearranging object to clear a pathway while only using a certain amount of moves, and the like. Basically, they were ports of other games that are readily available on other, non-brain-gym websites. Visually, I got the impression that they hoped exhibit a sense of legitimacy through their pared-down visual effects and graphics.
Ari was easily the prettiest friend I made on Lumosity
One of my favorites to play was a face-recognition one, Familiar Faces, where you had to memorize people’s names and type it out 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 real-life 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!)
Playing games with a premium membership allowed me to access a ‘brain profile,’ that presented me with my percentile score as compared to other gamers, as well as my BPI – Brain Performance index. The explanation for what exactly this index represented was vague at best, and all I know is that it was a number and that there were some users on the site with very high bpi’s (almost always the ones with paid memberships), and some with very low ones.
What???
What what????
Speaking of users, 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, according to their development blog, with no immediate sign of changing. This is significant in that it would appear to the first time user and potential subscriber that Lumosity is an amalgamation of well-established internet practices (flash gaming, adding and deleting friends, etc) — thereby lending it an immediate sense of familiarity. However, take a look closer and it is evident that there is no concept of the public sphere on the website. In fact, one could go as far as to say that there was the opposite — a purposeful lack of public space for discourse — on the website. There wasn’t even an ‘email’ field to fill out when entering information to go on your profile. All you are able to do is upload a picture and type a short bio. The possible reasons for this are endless — and I won’t even begin to speculate here, however this too is notable in that it runs counter many of the properties of the internet that we have studied thus far in this class — it renders so much of them irrelevant. For some reason, the awkwardness of almost–but not quite–having the ability to interact with other users was the most unsettling aspect of my exploration, and opened up the most questions. Is there some relationship between having a paid-for service, the acceptance of predetermined terms, and a lack of ability or will to criticize as it exists on this website? How is this so much different than something like 4chan? What implications does this have to other aspects of the internet? Or onto other aspects of our day to day lives?
Regardless, I did my best to interact with other users. Some of them had posted their email addresses in their profiles, and I attempted to contact them. 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 an extensive description of her injuries and subsequent recovery. “With the severity of my brain injuries,” she noted, “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 Raven any more about her injuries, instead focusing on her relationship with the website. A few messages in, and I ended up having to ask her if she was affiliated with the website in any way just for safety’s sake — her openness was unnerving, and in all honesty she seemed like an interactive advertising ploy. 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). Our conversation ended shortly thereafter. In thinking about this, it is a viable possibility that Raven was not a real girl but instead a fake user meant to advertise the possibility of Lumosity’s being used to help people with brain injuries. It is not public space, public domain, or a public sphere — it is a private, paid-for service and it would therefore be perfectly within their right to make up fake users. Strange, right?
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. His english was highly faulty, and he used the same Tyler Durden quotation in his profile and email response (Self-improvement is masturbation), but he seemed to have a good knowledge of the site. He said he noticed it helped him in day to day mathematics, though he doubted it actually made him smarter.
After extensive efforts to get in touch with Lumos Labs (I even called a couple of times!), all I was able to show for it was this email response that only answered a few of my questions — and with answers that could have been found on the website anyway. This was a bit disappointing.
As noted, most 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. Some reference scientific studies where they indicate that brain gaming specifically can help improve brain function. However, I recently came across this video series that shows a study whose results refute the others that I found — and those propagated on the Lumosity website. The study featured was one organized through the internet (it was much easier to do so) to disprove a new facet of the internet — new media cannibalism?
In conclusion — The jury is, and probably will always be out regarding both Lumosity.com and brain games — in my exploration I found evidence supporting and refuting both. On the one hand, Lumosity offers a slick interface and games that made me use my brain, however it does so in a highly-controlled environment that hints at but ultimately discourages its use as a social tool. Despite ‘friending’ multiple users and emailing a handful, I was unable to really garner the responses I was looking for. Brain games may be to your benefit, or they may just improve your arithmetic. Overall though, I think this look into the ‘brain game’ phenom has been enlightening if only in that it’s given me further insight into expansive possibilities of controlled/non-controlled environments that new media enables. Moreover, it inspired musings on the public sphere, on what a lack of discourse can do to an environment, as well as the differences between free and paid-for services.
