Can an iPhone app help rehab your brain, improve your mental flexibility, memory and thinking?
Lumosity, a mental fitness program designed by the neuroscience research company of the same name, offers nearly 40 unique brain games for players. Users are downloading the mobile phone version of the program in droves, and many believe the games can help rehabilitate your brain.
"Lumosity is like a gym for your brain, and to ensure that our users get the most benefit from the program, we've created a mobile experience that makes it convenient and fun to work out your brain from anywhere and at any time," Lumosity CEO Kunal Sarkar told NewsMax. "We're committed to encouraging healthy habit formation and lifelong brain health, and mobile brain training is integral in helping us reach that goal."
Since Nintendo popularized the genre of "brain games" in 2006, they've become a gaming staple, according to the Washington Post, beginning with the DS cartridge game "Brain Age," a puzzle game inspired by the work of Japanese neuroscientist Ryuta Kawashima.
Now games like Lumosity are on the rise, and their popularity is attributed to more than them being a fun side activity. Lumosity's mobile apps have been downloaded 20 million times, making it the current No. 1 education app in nearly 40 countries in the iTunes App Store.
Researchers are currently studying the immensely popular program, and one study from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia found that training with Lumosity can help improve cognition in patients with mild cognitive impairment.
Dr. Shelli Kesler, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, led and published a peer-reviewed study on the Lumosity brain games earlier this year, his research supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health. He published his findings in the journal Clinical Breast Cancer.
What he found was "significant," as cancer patients who had undergone chemotherapy showed marked improvement in cognitive flexibility, verbal fluency, and processing speed after playing Lumosity games four times a week for 12 weeks.
"Online, home-based, unsupervised cognitive training shows promise as an intervention for cognitive difficulties in breast cancer survivors," Dr. Kesler told PandoDaily. "Even long-term survivors can benefit."
Though an Android version of the app has yet to be released, the San Francisco-based company is currently working on developing one.
"We're committed to helping people from all walks of life remember more, think faster and perform better in everyday life, and part of that goal is to be able to provide all of our members with the full Lumosity experience in their native language," Lumosity CEO Kunal Sarkar said in a company press release. "This internationalization will also allow us to study human cognitive performance with more academic researchers, neuroscientists, teachers and clinicians around the globe to learn more about the real-life application of cognitive training."
