A Lumosity alternative built around daily brain exercise.

Brain-training games marketed around exercising memory, flexibility, and related skills.The category language around Lumosity has historically centred on broad cognitive improvement — better memory, faster thinking, better problem-solving at work and in everyday life — which is also what drew a 2016 FTC action and a $2 million settlement tied to deceptive advertising claims (FTC press release). The specific claims the FTC challenged included that Lumosity could sharpen performance on everyday tasks, delay age-related cognitive decline, reduce the effects of Alzheimer's disease, and reduce cognitive impairment from health conditions including ADHD and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Post-settlement, Lumosity's public marketing language has been more careful, though the underlying product (a library of short, repeatable cognitive games organised around BPI — Brain Performance Index — and various subscores) has remained largely unchanged. Pricing sits around $11.99/month or $59.99/year for the most recent reported tier.

Three primary sources are worth reading directly if you want to understand why brain-training marketing claims drew the response they did. First, the FTC's 2016 press release on the Lumosity settlement (FTC.gov) — short, specific, and identifies the exact marketing claims at issue. Second, the 2014 Stanford-organised consensus statement signed by over seventy cognitive scientists (Stanford consensus; Science coverage) — explicit about what the evidence did and did not support at the time. Third, Simons et al.'s 2016 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest (PMC summary; full text) — a careful survey of the evidence on commercial brain-training products specifically.

Together, those three documents describe a consistent picture: practice on a specific cognitive game tends to produce improvement on that specific game (near transfer); evidence for generalisation to broader cognitive abilities or real-world performance (far transfer) is weak; and broad marketing claims in the category outran the evidence. Lumosity was the most visible target of the response because it was the largest player. Other apps in the category faced less direct enforcement but inherit the broader scientific skepticism.

Senwitt's position is that the response was correct, the category mistake is real, and the right product structure is to sit outside the category — to sell daily practice on six specific skills without claiming transfer to cognitive constructs the practice does not directly target. See brain exercise vs brain training for the longer argument.