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

lumosityLumosity’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.”

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1 Comment

  1. Steve Zanon on March 28, 2016 at 7:49

    Extend­ing the plat­form into the “Applied Cog­ni­tive” space will be a good move by Berkowitz. Build­ing up on the game’s base (core) cog­ni­tive skills and active­ly bridg­ing think­ing skills into high­er (more com­plex) domains will go a long way to reduc­ing the trans­fer con­tro­ver­sy. An impor­tant strat­e­gy for Lumos Labs giv­en their recent FTC issue.



About SharpBrains

SHARPBRAINS is an independent think-tank and consulting firm providing services at the frontier of applied neuroscience, health, leadership and innovation.
SHARPBRAINS es un think-tank y consultoría independiente proporcionando servicios para la neurociencia aplicada, salud, liderazgo e innovación.

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