Lumosity: Can Brain-Training Games Help People with Dyslexia?

I should say at the outset that I use Lumosity, and I enjoy it. It has been part of my morning routine on and off for a long time, usually with a coffee, usually for a few minutes rather than an hour. So this is not a detached review from a distance. It is a review from someone who genuinely likes the thing being reviewed, and who also spends his working life assessing cognitive processing and therefore cannot help looking at it professionally.

That combination is exactly why I wanted to write it. Apps like this are often discussed in one of two unhelpful ways: either as a cure for something, or as a complete waste of time. Neither is accurate, and neither is much use to a dyslexic adult trying to decide whether to spend money on a subscription.

What Lumosity is

Lumosity is a commercial brain-training programme, available as a website and a mobile app, made by Lumos Labs. It presents short game-style activities grouped around areas such as attention, memory, processing speed, cognitive flexibility, problem-solving and, in some versions, language and maths. A daily session typically offers a handful of games, takes a few minutes, and produces scores that are tracked over time.

The company's own description of what the product contains is a reasonable source for what the games are. It is not a reasonable source for whether those games improve anybody's thinking, and I have kept those two questions firmly apart in what follows.

Why this interests me as an assessor

A diagnostic assessment does not simply measure reading and spelling. It looks at the underlying processes that support literacy and learning, including phonological processing, working memory, processing speed and rapid naming, alongside reasoning and attainment. You can read more about how that fits together in what is dyslexia.

Some people with dyslexia show relative weaknesses in one or more of those areas. Others do not. This matters, and it is worth being precise about: these difficulties are individual, and they are not universal features of dyslexia. I regularly assess dyslexic adults with strong working memory, and others whose processing speed is a genuine bottleneck. A profile is a pattern, not a checklist.

So when an app claims to train attention, memory and processing speed, my professional interest is immediate — and so is my professional caution. Those are the same words that appear in assessment reports, and it is very easy for someone to read "working memory training" and hear "dyslexia treatment". They are not the same thing at all.

What I like about it

• •The activities are short. Most last a minute or two. That is a realistic amount of cognitive effort to ask of yourself before work, and it removes the usual excuse.
• •The feedback is immediate. You see how you did straight away, which is motivating in a way that few self-improvement activities manage.
• •It builds a habit. Regular practice happens because the sessions are small and the app is mildly insistent about it.
• •It makes effort enjoyable. Deliberately challenging your own attention or memory is usually tedious. Presented as a game, it is not.
• •It is a gentle prompt to notice yourself. I find it interesting to see how differently I perform when tired, distracted or rushing. That observation is arguably more useful than the score.

None of those are claims about cognitive improvement. They are claims about engagement, and engagement is genuinely valuable — but it is a different thing.

Looking at the games through an assessor's eyes

What I find genuinely interesting is recognising familiar cognitive demands dressed up as entertainment. A few examples of the kinds of activity Lumosity includes, and what they appear to draw upon:

• •Trains-and-tracks style routing puzzles. You direct items to matching destinations while more keep arriving. This appears to draw on divided attention, planning and inhibiting a response you have already started.
• •Grid or card matching tasks. You hold the locations of items in mind while searching for a pair. This looks like visual working memory, with an element of strategy in how you search.
• •Rapid symbol or colour sorting. You classify items quickly against a rule that may change. This appears to draw on processing speed and cognitive flexibility — switching rules without carrying the old one over.
• •Word or letter tasks. You form, recognise or recall words under time pressure. These appear to involve lexical access and verbal fluency, which are related to (but not the same as) the phonological processing looked at in an assessment.
• •Sequence recall tasks. You reproduce a growing sequence. This resembles a span task, which is one of the ways working memory is measured formally.

What I find genuinely interesting is recognising familiar cognitive demands dressed up as entertainment.

But does brain training actually work?

This is the section that matters, and it needs three separate ideas kept apart, because almost all of the confusion in this field comes from collapsing them into one.

• •Getting better at the activity you practise. This is well established and completely unsurprising. Practise a game and your score on that game goes up. Nobody disputes this.
• •Improvement on similar tasks ("near transfer"). Sometimes practice carries over to closely related tasks that share the same format or demand. The evidence here is more modest and more variable.
• •Meaningful transfer to real life ("far transfer"). This is the claim that matters: better reading, better studying, better performance at work, better everyday functioning. This is where the evidence is weakest.

The most thorough review of the field is Simons and colleagues (2016) in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, which examined the evidence cited by the brain-training industry itself. Their conclusion, put simply, was that there is good evidence people improve at trained tasks, far less evidence of broader cognitive improvement, and little support for the claim that these programmes improve everyday functioning.

Similarly, a meta-analysis by Melby-Lervåg, Redick and Hulme (2016) found that working memory training produced short-term gains on trained and closely related tasks but did not produce reliable far transfer to measures of intelligence or, importantly here, to word reading.

It is also relevant that in 2016 the US Federal Trade Commission announced a settlement with Lumos Labs over its advertising, on the basis that the company had claimed benefits for school, work and everyday performance without adequate evidence. That is a finding about marketing claims, not a verdict that the games are worthless — but it is a good reason to treat any strong promise from any brain-training company with scepticism.

Lumos Labs has published research of its own, including a large randomised trial (Hardy et al., 2015) reporting gains on cognitive tests in the training group. It is a real study, published in a peer-reviewed journal, and worth reading. It was also funded and conducted by the company, used cognitive tests rather than real-world outcomes, and sits within a wider literature that remains mixed. Company-funded evidence is not automatically wrong; it simply cannot be the last word.

My personal view, kept separate

Having set out what the research shows, here is my own opinion, clearly labelled as opinion.

I like regularly challenging my own thinking. I find it enjoyable, I notice when I am sharper or more tired, and I would rather spend five minutes doing something mildly demanding than five minutes scrolling. I suspect that being willing to sit with difficulty, make errors and try again has some value in itself, particularly for people who have spent years avoiding tasks that make them feel slow.

That is a personal impression and a plausible-sounding argument. It is not evidence, and I would not want anyone to read it as though it were. If someone asked me whether Lumosity would improve their reading, my honest answer is that I have no basis for saying so.

My verdict

I enjoy Lumosity and I would happily recommend it as an engaging way to spend a few minutes doing something cognitively demanding rather than passive. It is well made, the sessions are short, and the immediate feedback keeps you coming back.

What I would not do is present it as an intervention for dyslexia, or as a substitute for the things that genuinely help: specialist teaching, sensible strategies, appropriate adjustments and the right assistive technology. It is one small tool within a much bigger picture — and, in my view, an enjoyable one.

If you are looking for technology that will make a practical difference day to day, our guide to technology and assistive tools for dyslexia is a better starting point, because text-to-speech, speech-to-text and organisation tools work by removing a barrier rather than by promising to change how you process. My review of Elevate looks at an app that sits somewhere between the two.

Evidence and further reading

• •Simons, D. J., Boot, W. R., Charness, N., Gathercole, S. E., Chabris, C. F., Hambrick, D. Z., & Stine-Morrow, E. A. L. (2016). Do "Brain-Training" Programs Work? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17(3), 103–186.
• •Melby-Lervåg, M., Redick, T. S., & Hulme, C. (2016). Working Memory Training Does Not Improve Performance on Measures of Intelligence or Other Measures of "Far Transfer". Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(4), 512–534.
• •Hardy, J. L., et al. (2015). Enhancing Cognitive Abilities with Comprehensive Training: A Large, Online, Randomized, Active-Controlled Trial. PLOS ONE. (Study funded and conducted by Lumos Labs.)
• •Federal Trade Commission (2016). Lumosity to Pay $2 Million to Settle FTC Deceptive Advertising Charges for Its "Brain Training" Program.
• •British Dyslexia Association — about dyslexia and support.

If you are wondering about your own profile rather than about apps, a full diagnostic dyslexia assessment looks properly at reading, spelling, writing and the underlying processing, and you are welcome to get in touch to talk it through first.