Lumosity review
Lumosity trains your brain, in particular your memory and attention, through fun mini-games, which you can play daily. It's a truly ingenious application with a wonderful interface and a great user experience.
Pros
Brainy but fun: With its colorful cognitive puzzles that involve quickly responding to visual stimuli while exercising your memory and doing sums, Lumosity makes neuroscience tests look cool. It gracefully integrates advanced concepts such as neuroplasticity into entertaining mini-games that train specific parts of your brain with the aim of improving your memory, attention, problem-solving skills, or response speed, making brain training enjoyable and even addictive.
Progress tracking and stats comparison keeps you motivated: For each game you play, you score points based on your performance; you can then compare your results over time and discover your cognitive strengths and weaknesses.
Concentrated experience: Lumosity takes up only around 15 minutes of your time each day. Although you can choose to replay the three daily games you're given, this app doesn't force you to spend time with it to make progress; it's all about focus.
Cons
Crash bug: During our tests, the app crashed repeatedly right after we completed a mini-game, so our results were not recorded. Restarting the app and replaying the game were necessary to move on to the next cognitive challenge.
Free version comes with limitations: To enjoy premium daily workouts with 15 games on your mobile device that adapt to your skill level, you have to upgrade to Lumosity Premium for $15/month or $80/year.
Bottom Line
In terms of its concept and execution, Lumosity outshines most other brain training programs, contending with Elevate for the title of best cognitive training app for Android. It's a remarkably well-made, bright little app that keeps your mind sharp without becoming a time sink. That said, whether or not it can really make you a better thinker is of course questionable. Yes, the research suggests so, but can we really measure the difference?
