21–30 of 259 posts
It seemed ED to be more of a "We will give you a chance to raise an arbitrary number over time if you pay us" and heavy marketing ploy.
Seems like if cow clicker got viral and took peoples money.
I just wanted to share my thoughts, which are simply: "Thank God!" I've been working on a startup: http://synaptitude.me/ (demo is old) Essentially, we can do some of what Luminosity claims (and have independent studies to prove it). Every time someone goes: "Oh it's just like Lumosity" I have to go through and explain the difference. My wife has a degree in neuroscience and I minored in BioE, and we both just HATE L…
I would like to see how this sort of thing could benefit people with traumatic brain injuries as it would be a great service to people suffering from this sort of malady but also probably easier to measure the effects on this group compared to a bunch of average individuals.
With TBI, the issue is often connectivity between parts of the brain, and that can be measured as EEG Coherence.
I agree with lettergram and others, that without feedback these type braingames don't really do anything.
NPR plays ads on the radio about Lumosity and brain training, nearly every day for the last year here. It seemed ED to be more of a "We will give you a chance to raise an arbitrary number over time if you pay us" and heavy marketing ploy. Seems like if cow clicker got viral and took peoples money.
Many of the pro-brain-training camp have already begun to shift the goal posts. First it was 'simple games increase IQ,' which turned out to be difficult to prove when well controlled studies were performed. Now it's more along the lines of 'These simple games might have preventative effects against age related declines!,' which is an even harder claim to actually prove given the difficulties performing well controlled studies on aged participants.
In the cognitive science world, if we discovered a solid far transfer paradigm, especially one which transferred to something like G(eneral Intelligence), it would be our anti-baldness pill\flying car\4-day cellphone battery. People thought that these working memory transfer effects were the real deal and got very excited about it, money poured in, and the water got muddied by all these scientists with conflicts.
I obviously don't put much stock in working memory training. I wish it worked like they said, but I don't think it does. If far-transfer shows up at all, it's tiny, and doesn't persist after delay.
I just wanted to share my thoughts, which are simply: "Thank God!" I've been working on a startup: http://synaptitude.me/ (demo is old) Essentially, we can do some of what Luminosity claims (and have independent studies to prove it). Every time someone goes: "Oh it's just like Lumosity" I have to go through and explain the difference. My wife has a degree in neuroscience and I minored in BioE, and we both just HATE L…
I would like to see how this sort of thing could benefit people with traumatic brain injuries as it would be a great service to people suffering from this sort of malady but also probably easier to measure the effects on this group compared to a bunch of average individuals.
However, we don't have funding at this point (partially because we want to avoid Luminosity's fate of being tied to growth), so we are just focusing on getting a fully developed product that some psychologists we are working with would use.
Based on the ads and no little fine print at the bottom citing any real science, I was a skeptic from the outset. Never did any real research to find out if their claims were inflated - or even viable in the first place. Apparently when challenged by the FTC they didn't have anything solid to show in their defense. Oh, and then there's this bit: >The complaint also charges the defendants with failing to disclose that…
>The order also imposes a $50 million judgment against Lumos Labs, which will be suspended due to its financial condition after the company pays $2 million to the Commission. So does that mean after paying this fine, Lumosity is in financial trouble?
There are outliers for which I wouldn't quite say "not to be trusted" like Dollar Shave Club and Blue Apron, but even in those cases you are, IMO, overpaying for a vanishingly small amount of convenience.
I think it holds up pretty well though that putting a lot of effort into advertising via "live reads" on radio and podcasts is a negative indicator as to how much you can trust a company.
Great article on this trend of investors/entrepreneurs with no scientific background thinking they can get into the space and "shake things up": Silicon Valley is confusing pseudo-science with innovation [0] > I don’t think all the VC firms that are moving into the space know what they’re doing — so I think you only need a couple of nasty failures to get them to pull back. Take Pathway Genomics, for instance, which w…
The cofounder Michael Scanlon has a neuroscience PhD. http://www.lumosity.com/about/our_team
Lumosity seems like one of those companies that bit off more than it could chew. Then, to fulfill investor expectations, they started to engage in shady and unethical sales practices.