Under new CEO, Lumosity to expand brain training platform with focus on applied skills and broader social, wellness factors

Lumosity’s Stum­ble Reveals How We Think About Think­ing (Buz­zFeed News):

“The ads were per­va­sive, pop­ping up on CNN, Fox News, NPR, and Google search­es. And they were per­sua­sive: Play­ing Lumos­i­ty games would do your brain good…But these claims sound­ed a lit­tle too rosy to the Fed­er­al Trade Com­mis­sion, which cit­ed these and oth­er ads in alleg­ing that Lumos Labs, the mak­er of Lumos­i­ty, preyed on people’s fears with non-sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly val­i­dat­ed claims. Ear­li­er this year, the com­pa­ny set­tled the charges by pay­ing $2 mil­lion into a fund for refunds, though it’s by no means going away or giv­ing up — it has a new CEO at the helm and a plan to cre­ate new games and bring on more customers…Lumos Labs’ new CEO, Steve Berkowitz, is not a sci­en­tist. He has been the pres­i­dent of IDG Books, the pub­lish­er of the Dum­mies series; an exec­u­tive at Microsoft; the CEO of Ask.com…This year, Berkowitz said, the team wants to branch out into applied skills like lan­guage arts and math and improve the social aspect of the games by mak­ing it easy for rel­a­tives to share their progress. And for the first time, Lumos Labs may design games to improve well­ness fac­tors like mind­ful­ness and sleep…

Fer­nan­dez of Sharp­Brains not­ed that not all brain-train­ing games are guilty of exag­ger­at­ed, ill-sup­port­ed claims. “We have to be care­ful not to throw out the baby with the bath­wa­ter,” he said. “Some peo­ple think every­thing works and some peo­ple think noth­ing works, and the real­i­ty, the truth, is some­thing in the middle.”

To learn more:

• Solv­ing the Brain Fit­ness Puz­zle Is the Key to Self-Empow­ered Aging
• Can brain train­ing work? Yes, if it meets these 5 conditions
• The Fed­er­al Trade Com­mis­sion vs Lumos­i­ty: What does it mean for the brain train­ing market?