Lumosity

The other day, I saw the commercial of lumosity on TV. It says that by playing games, you can improve your intelligence. So I visited the web site www.lumosity.com to try out. It is free to register, but if you don't pay, you get to play limited types of games every day. You can play the same game over and over, but I noticed that if I play more, my score often gets lower. Unless you didn't know how to play, usually the first few games get the best score.

There was this software for Nintendo DS called Brain Age, that was some what similar. As you play more, your brain works better. Of course, when you play more of these games, you can do better. However I am not too sure some of the games are really that helpful in increasing mental intelligence.
My favorite game from lumosity is called Penguin Pursuit. You will use four keys, left, right, up, down arrows to move your penguin inside the maze to get to the fish in the middle. While you move the arrows, the screen turns around and make you get confused. When I tried for the first time, I got totally confused and couldn't move the penguin properly, but as you get to used to it, this is actually a lot of fun.

To me, some games don't really have much benefit. For example, they have this game to remember the name of the character on the screen, and give them the right items as they order you. If you recall the names of the character from few days ago, your score gets higher. I am not sure if remembering some character face and name from the game would improve anything. They always wear the same clothes and comes with same expression on their faces, so I think this is far from real situation. Well, maybe they just want us to remember something, not necessarily a face.

If you want to try, you can register it at www.lumosity.com for free to start.

Image by By Gustavo da Cunha Pimenta on flickr