We’ve made a number of updates to ensure that Lumosity continues to run smoothly across all modern devices and to improve your overall brain training experience. Read to learn about what’s changed.

As part of ongoing efforts to improve Lumosity, we’ve updated how we calculate your Lumosity Performance Index (LPI). These changes are designed to give you a more accurate picture of your cognitive strengths and how your training is progressing. Learn more about what’s changed and why!

Can what we eat affect how we think? We tend to think about diet as it relates to our physical fitness and waistline, but did you know it can also affect our mood and cognition?

UCSF’s Anne Richards used Lumosity data in hopes to answer the question: how much sleep is best for cognitive performance, and is there such a thing as too much?

This year marks the 75th anniversary of Mental Health Awareness Month, a significant milestone highlighting an enduring commitment to the advancement of mental health care and advocacy. As we’ve written about in the past, mental health and cognition are deeply intertwined, which is why we love using this time of year to reflect on the importance of mental well-being.

Just as bodily health is relevant to everyone with a body, mental health is relevant to everyone with a mind. That is to say, whether you're feeling tip-top or a little down, whether you have a formal diagnosis or are just looking for a little support – it’s important to know that mental health needs are universal, and there are a number of resources available to you.

Let’s delve into the themes outlined by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) for this year’s observance.

Nelson Dellis has won the USA Memory Championship 5 times and, more importantly for this context, he also holds the world record for memorizing the most names in 15 minutes: 235. So, what are his best tips for playing this game?

Following a new recipe asks a lot of our brain, especially when it’s one of Chef Crouton’s experimental recipes. Not only are his recipes wildly unpredictable, but they are also guarded secrets, which means you’ll have to memorize each recipe before preparing it. Cognition Kitchen is based on a task used in research, aptly named “Following Instructions.”

Isn't it nice when someone remembers your name? We think so, especially since it can be so easy to forget the name of someone you just met - or worse, someone you’ve met more than once. What’s My Name? is a new game designed to help you practice this critical skill.

What does progress in a Lumosity game typically look like? Should one expect to improve steadily? How does one break through when scores are plateauing? Research from Yoni Donner and Joseph L Hardy may give us some clues...

Do we hear with our ears or our brain? Research suggests that hearing loss isn’t all in the ears where we typically think of hearing taking place. While congenital deafness is usually caused by anomalies in the inner ear, there is a cognitive component to hearing that not only describes how sounds get processed by the brain, but which may account for some hearing problems as well....

Groups of ants and groups of humans don’t behave all that differently, despite being on opposite ends of the evolutionary tree. As Jurgen Kurths of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research puts it “While the single ant is certainly not smart, the collective acts in a way that I’m tempted to call intelligent.”

Collective intelligence in animals accounts for the highly complex societies and behaviors that bees, ants, birds, and fish display, even when the collective’s individual animals may lack planning power on their own....

Dissociation is the state of failing to recognize your current or former self. A certain level of dissociation is an everyday event: We often step out of our immediate environment or consciousness when we daydream or have “highway hypnosis”—the sense of not having been aware of driving, especially on a familiar route. Dissociation has even been considered a cognitive skill associated with absorption in a task. But we count on emerging from these states....

Is it possible to think and learn without a brain? Plants don’t have brains, at least not in the traditional sense, and yet they can exhibit complex behaviors such as bending themselves towards light. Such observations have sparked the budding field of Plant Cognition.

“Workers are more productive in large cities” (Bacolod et al., 2020). This has been well established for years, but the reasons behind the phenomenon remain a bit of a chicken-or-egg question: Does being together make workers more productive, or do inherently more productive workers tend to congregate? And, what exactly makes them more productive in the first place?

Rats smell in stereo, with one nostril picking up one scent, while the other is busy smelling something else. Air flow is directed separately to the two nostrils, which are “almost completely isolated from each other and supply two distinct sheets of olfactory sensory epithelia,” according to a 2006 study. Amazingly, the rat brain can process each independent smell simultaneously. While physiological adaptations explain some differences in smell, olfaction remains the least understood of the five senses. Indeed, whether the animals cited above are actually better at smelling than humans are is a matter of some dispute, and that dispute is influenced by factors that are not limited to the nose....