I joined a few months ago and have been playing pretty steadily almost every day for approximately 15 minutes a session.
Although I think the brain-training claims are absolute baloney, I find the games themselves somewhat addicting, especially as I am able to track the trends of my scores as they increase over time, even though I know that the only thing I am getting better at are those particular games, but hey, it is a fun 15-minute per day diversion.
Not a very valid data point, but I listen to the podcast “Stuff You Missed in History Class,” and a 5 minute Lumosity commercial is given by the podcast presenters in the middle of the episode. It sucks because it’s so jarring. One minute I’m learning about some weird old aristocrat with an interesting story etc., and the next I’m hearing about how my brain is slowly submitting to entropy. Is there a term for when advertising has the effect of making you want to avoid the product?
I’m a member and I’ve been doing the training program for 9 months or so now.
I’m skeptical for a whole lot of reasons.
My scores are good but not great, especially when it comes to speed - this may be because I’ve never played any video games other than card games and the Lumosity games. And my scores are steadily improving but I don’t know that it means anything except that I’m getting better at their games.
There is very little information on their website about what the games actually accomplish from a neuroscience point of view and what little info they have is dumbed down.
My biggest complaint is that there is NO user forum and no user feedback on their website. This leads me to believe that they are hiding something and that they don’t really want their users interacting and comparing notes. There are some highly suspect “user tips” for some of the games …suspect because there is no way to actually submit a tip so I don’t know where they get them.
I find that the scoring on a lot of games is too heavily weighted to favor speed over accuracy so that I don’t feel my best scores reflect my best played games – they are usually on games where I had lots of errors but blew through it fast.
And I’ve completely aced that game where you wait on customers and remember their names – it’s been 3 months since I had anything less than a perfect score on the top level. It would be annoying if I cared about the Lumosity “points” as you only get bonus points when you beat a score, not when you tie it.
I do find the games to be an enjoyable diversion, though – that’s really why I do it.
I am not great with that game, primarily because I am not great with matching faces to names and remembering them. The only names I tend to get right all the time are Jennifer, because she looks like a nurse to me, and Charles, because he looks like a dirtbag.
My favorite game is Word Bubbles Rising. My high score is 10,720. If I had the time, I think I could play that one for hours.
Oh, me too. I just hit a new high of 11,170…of course my high numbers happen when I luck out with letter sets they give you…my average is probably about 9000.
I always think I could do better if I was a better typist and I have spelling difficulties with longer works in that time frame.
The Familiar Faces game was one of those times when I thought maybe there was something to their “science”. I struggled with the lower levels for forever, they one day something clicked and it suddenly became easy … I advanced from level 4 to the top level (8) in about 3 days. The really cool thing was it wasn’t a challenge at all to remember anyone I “met” while playing the upper levels but I still struggled for a while with some of the people introduced in the lower levels.
I just topped my high score in Word Bubbles Rising!
Continually bettering my high scores is one of my main motivations to still play, although I can feel that I am getting close to the highest I can achieve in many games, such as the migration game with the 5 birds. I still get scores in the top five in that one, but I haven’t beaten my top score in weeks.
For the first time today, I made it to 11875 in Word Bubbles, and noticed something strange/funny.
Those of you who play Word Bubbles know that your ship starts at the bottom of the ocean and for each word you create from the prefix you’re given your ship rises a little. The more words you create, the higher your ship rises. With a high enough score, your ship rises up out of the ocean and into the air eventually overtaking a hot air balloon. However, did you know that you can reach space? I didn’t, until today. At around 11500 my ship was surrounded by stars, and by 11800 I saw astronauts floating in spacesuits. Here’s where the strange/funny part comes in.
At 11850 I saw the moon, but not just the moon. There were words in space following the curvature of the moon. The best I could make out of the words before the scoreboard appeared, closing out my game and obscuring the words was “Look at this cat.” Can anyone confirm this message?
Kind of freaked me out that (a) my ship had made it into space, (b) there were words following the curvature of the moon, and (c) that is was a message. It did make me laugh, though.
There are different plans based on length of membership. I am paying $79.95 for a yearly subscription, which works out to $6.66 per month.
There is a two-year membership for $122.62, which would work out to $5.10 per month.
There is also a lifetime membership for $241.31
If I were you, I would check out a free membership first and then, if you decide you like it, go for a paid membership. The free membership limits the number of games you can play, and I believe there are other limitations, but it is free, and anyway you may not like it and it would be better to find that out before locking into a paid membership.
I did the free stuff. It’s way too much money just to play games.
Playing games does keep your mind sharp, as you age, but that’s pretty much any game, as long as it makes you think a bit and pay attention.
Honestly, I play with sound off and I never paid any attention to the background until you pointed it out. I did notice since that I leave the ocean, go through cloud layer with blimps and very occasionally hit outer space.
I listed the words in my previous post in the incorrect order as my third round was: ‘prep-pre-pr’ but you get the idea. 82 words but not enough to beat my high score. It didn’t help that I only got 1130 in the first round, but how much could I have done with ‘zi’?
