Brain
training has come into the spotlight with Tuesday’s announcement
by the Federal Trade Commission that the popular website Lumosity will be
forced to pay a $2 million settlement for making false advertising claims.

Lumos
Labs, Inc., which does business as Lumosity, was ordered to pay the money by
the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to settle an
FTC complaint that the company claimed its games could improve everyday
tasks, delay age-related cognitive declines, and improve a variety of other
mental impairments. The FTC also charged the company with failing to disclose
that it had solicited testimonials through contests that awarded major prizes.

Lumosity
sells games to customers that are ostensibly designed to target particular
cognitive skills. The user takes a test to get “baseline” scores on these skills,
and then begins playing. The games get more difficult as the user plays them,
and as a result the scores (should) improve.

The
company has long used scientific terms in a dubious manner to increase its cred
among potential customers.

One
of its go-to words has been “neuroplasticity” - a fancy way of saying that the
structure of your brain changes with your experiences.

It’s
true that the connections in your brain change when you learn a new language,
when you witness a traumatic event…and when you play computer games.

It’s
also true that some skills are broadly applicable. Many are things we spend
years in school to perfect: reading, writing, arithmetic, teamwork, following
directions, critical thinking.

These
are all forms of “brain training” that take advantage of “neuroplasticity.” But
we generally don’t gussy them up in scientific jargon. We call them “learning.”

Part
of Lumosity’s charm, though, is the plausibility of its claims. Some seem
commonsensical. Everyone knows that practicing a skill will improve it. It’s
also generally accepted that challenging one’s mind and keeping active can
stave off (or at least slow) some kinds of cognitive declines.

But
Lumosity’s pitch goes beyond this. Its central argument is that its regimen of
simple games is broadly transferable to other skills, and that those games are
better than other forms of activity.

Seen
in this light, the company has a tougher row to hoe. In real life, we don’t
suggest that learning to ride a bike will make you better at driving a car.

If
you want to learn to drive a car, you drive a car.

Lumosity
has gone to great lengths to bolster its claims of validity, conducting and
pointing to numerous examples of peer-reviewed research.

As
it turns out, there is a wealth of research on the subject of cognitive
training. The problem is that most of it remains mixed and
correlative. On the specific question of generalizability – the
transference, say, of working
memory skills to intelligence – the data so far are mostly negative.

That’s
bad news for Lumosity, because its model relies on the assumption that skill in
its games is generalizable to other areas of players’ lives.

And,
of course, all those negative studies (here’s another) don’t
make the cut on Lumosity’s
reference list.

Even
after its regulatory slap-down, the company’s home page continues to tout its
scientific bona fides.

As
of Saturday, the website displayed a
reference to an in-house study it conducted comparing users who played Lumosity’s
games against a control group that was given crossword puzzles.

The
study, published in September in the
journal PLOS ONE, found
that Lumosity players did better on an assessment given after ten weeks of
playing. It also showed an increase in the post-test assessment of crossword,
but with an edge in most areas for the Lumosity group.

Though
this study is internally consistent, it is not (as so many of Lumosity’s ads
would have you believe) neuroscience. Nor are most of the studies published by
Lumos Labs. The bulk of them more accurately fall under the social sciences and suffer many of
the traditional limitations of such research.

For
instance, the participants in this study were chosen randomly, but they were
drawn from a pool of people who had already signed up to Lumosity. Since it
wouldn’t be possible to blind the participants (that is, they would know which
group they were in by virtue of the games they were allowed to play), it’s not
much of a leap to presume that the crossword group might have started with
lower expectations for the group they found themselves in, while the reverse
would be true of the group allowed to play Lumosity games.

Then
there’s the problem of inherent researcher bias. Industry-funded research is
notorious for this, and begs to be replicated by an independent lab.

And,
as usual, this study is only correlative. That key element of causation remains
lacking.

Though
Lumosity’s devotion to science remains merely self-aggrandizing, it is playing
by the rules. The now-mandatory caveat emptor language is included on its home
page:

“These
results are promising, but we need to do more research to determine the
connection between improved assessment scores and everyday tasks in
participants’ lives.”

More
research is needed indeed. Whether any aspect of the brain training fad pans
out scientifically remains to be seen.

Until
then, the only thing Lumosity customers are definitely getting is the privilege
of paying to flip tiles.