I've been working on a startup: http://synaptitude.me/ (demo is old)
Essentially, we can do some of what Luminosity claims (and have independent studies to prove it). Every time someone goes: "Oh it's just like Lumosity" I have to go through and explain the difference. My wife has a degree in neuroscience and I minored in BioE, and we both just HATE Lumosity. Their misleading ads seriously damaged the public perception, and there is no way they can assess anything they claim (if it is even possible).
That's pretty much why my startup is working on our applications. We feel there is a market and can definitely help people, but just "brain games" (without feedback/guidance) don't do anything.
You might seriously want to reconsider the wording thereof. Even metaphorically, that sounds dangerously close to something the FDA might object to.
If I were in this space, I'd start putting "not FDA evaluated" disclaimers on my site and marketing, and temper my promises right away.
Even if you're more effective, you not have to prove you're not a fraud.
This is unfortunately not rare at all and the 'hotter' a market seems the more of these BS artists will enter. In the end you have the same product and the same relationship with your customers but you're going to end up spending a lot of time differentiating yourself from the snake oil peddlers and the damage they can do is very real.
Good companies have gone under in the wake of the scandals triggered by the fakers. Playing a long game while your field is being torn up by people playing a short game is extremely frustrating.
Basically, Pepsi introduced a soda called Crystal Clear that was gaining momentum in the "clear soda" market. Coke wanted to sabotage the public perception, so they introduced "Tab Clear" and made it taste so terrible, that both products failed within 6 months. After that, no one wanted to touch clear soda for a while. (That is, until Coke reintroduced another drink called Sprite).
[1]http://thedailyjournalist.com/pen-and-pad/corporate-sabotage...
Like FB destroyed the trust of social networks, and ruined it for themself and their competitors? The same with chat with WhatsApp and other pseudo secure chat apps.
Help me understand something. So you link to papers where some kind of biofeedback is used to help with Anxiety, and then you claim that you do some kind of biofeedback as well, and therefore .... you are helping with Anxiety. Is that about right? Are those your "independent studies"?
Can you make that stronger claim? Is there a review article that we can Google?
The challenege is doing that without a large financial backing. It just takes longer.
However, we don't have funding at this point (partially because we want to avoid Luminosity's fate of being tied to growth), so we are just focusing on getting a fully developed product that some psychologists we are working with would use.
With TBI, the issue is often connectivity between parts of the brain, and that can be measured as EEG Coherence.
I agree with lettergram and others, that without feedback these type braingames don't really do anything.
" According to the CDC one in five Americans have ADHD, anxiety, or depression.
Impacting productivity, focus, and mood.
We can help, with ThinkSuite!"
Chemicals can't even help me, how would ThinkSuite? If I could cure this crap with a site, I would, but we can't.
[1] http://synaptitude.me/blog/neurofeedback-in-200-words/
Essentially, we can help people identify bad practices and create better ones.
Turns out many of us don't realize when we start losing attention, or feeling sad. We just suddenly realize we do feel bad. The idea is to make you more aware of what makes you feel bad/lose attention, then you can control it (to a degree).
The end goal of our system is to use it in combination with other therapies, drugs, and medical professionals to determine the effectiveness of a therapy/drug on an individual and improve it. Coupled with that we can provide better coping skills, and our own therapy called neurofeedback (as mentioned).
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and opt for c). Sorry to pop your bubble, but your startup is not going to work out in the current form. All I see from your website, is a company founded by three students who read some papers about EEG and want to sell me a treatment for ADHD and depression using home made beta software and a consumer grade! EEG headset.
At least in my book, this is flat out quackery and one of the reason that Neurofeedback is still seen in many places as 'alternative medicine' and does not have a stellar reputation although it has been shown as effective in a couple clinical trials.
First of all don't even try to conduct a survey on treatment efficacies to make up for missing data on your own website. Please leave this to clinical trials.
Second, you compare your pricing model with allegedly professional Neurofeedback providers, by actually not offering any in-person session and non-medical EEG devices? Is this really not a joke?
Let's just ignore for now the fact that consumer grade EEG headsets don't even offer the precision you need for proper Neurofeedback training. e.g. Emotiv epoc offers 14 channels@128Hz, where real EEG hardware usually has at least twice the sampling rate, a greater bandwidth, and 19-21 channels (up to 256 in research).
Most importantly, how do you even think your treatment works? You can't just look for any occurrences of "slow-wave power" and then tell your patient that he should pay more attention now. That's not how any of this works.
You need to identify signal signatures in response to standardized stimuli. In patients and "healthy" controls. You need to account for the whole spectrum of any mental disorder. Even though they are usually defined as in the DSM as "one disorder" with couple of symptoms, on the individual level there is not much commonality left among all the people with the "same disorder". So you need to "reassemble" the disorder bottom-up, by clustering different sub-types based on biological markers (EEG profiles). Then you got to match them to their clinical diagnosis. If you have any meaningful data left by then, you might be able to identify a small set of markers that exhibit a high predictability, that a given patient belongs to a presumed subtype. Existing commercial databases are of the order of 1K-4K healthy controls and hundreds of patients. Then you can start a training using those markers. Now comes the fun part of assessing the clinical efficacy of your new marker set. You'll get a whole bunch of sub-types like high frontal delta/low dorsal alpha/low beta, high alpha/low beta, or low theta/high dorsal alpha/"higher" frontal beta, etc. ... each of which has to be trained accordingly.
I really don't see how you want to recreate all of this on consumer EEG hardware. And if you opt for the current medical hard&software/databases: then what's your value proposition? How do you want to beat current model, of a licensed practitioner guided by a supervisory psychologist? Because this setup gives you the efficacy of the literature and it costs a hell lot of money.
Please don't sell any "treatment" that you can't provide. I can understand that it is a very tempting and huge market: "According to the CDC one in five Americans have ADHD, anxiety, or depression.", if you really want to make money there, go to big pharma, if you actually want to "cure it", go to research. But I really don't think, that selling this quackery is going to benefit anyone.
disclaimer: this is neither my field, nor do I have any stakes in that particular game, just happen to know some people doing actual research on this matter.
I have three small kids, my youngest, before she could even speak, was able to pic up an iPhone, unlock it and browse to various apps including camera, gallery and netflix and take pics, view them or select a movie to watch. Yet she couldn't yet formulate a word.
So given this, I assume that there is a great deal that an iPhone like device could be leveraged upon to accomplish greater learning...
How would you propose this be done with the ubiquity of such devices at this time?
I have some theories but I'd like to hear your position first.
Just don't be seduced by the dark side. Be honest with how accurate your tools are. The results will speak for themselves.
Seems pretty interesting though, signed up for Early Access.
Please don't spam me with updates :P. Just awaiting access to Beta.
Thanks for signing up!
My wife (Japanese) always says "good for older people" about any sort of puzzle. She didn't get this from being deceived by Lumosity.
The FTC is being very heavy-handed here.
It's like someone sold carrots claiming they improve vision, and got thrown in jail.
Testimonials being paid for shills? Like, say it ain't so. Every damed commercial you've ever seen in your life has fake people presenting fake testimonials. It's assumed.
(Claiming that doing puzzles can stave off Alzheimer's is going somewhat far, though. That disease has specific physiological causes which can't be reversed through brain activity.)
No, it's not. It's like they were appropriately fined for profiting off unproven medical claims.
> Testimonials being paid for shills? Like, say it ain't so. Every damed commercial you've ever seen in your life has fake people presenting fake testimonials. It's assumed.
And they're labelled as an actor representation. Giving them a pass because it's "assumed" is irresponsible and harmful to those who might not otherwise know.
...is the law of the land in USA
It's called "puffery"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery
> In law, puffery is a promotional statement or claim that expresses subjective rather than objective views, which no "reasonable person" would take literally.
US Supreme Court has ruled that lying in ads is protected speech, up to some non-specified boundary:
This is the same sort of thing that a lot of people criticized the FDA over for going after Cheerios for making claims about being healthy for your heart.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB124216077825612187
It's a good thing that there are parts of the government out there making sure you can't just make up whatever you want to sell a product.
Sure you can. You just have to be selling drugs, rather than video games.
I don't quite follow the logic.
Are you kidding me? A quick Google search turned up revenue of $24 million in 2013. 2014 and 2015 numbers did not come up on my quick search, but I'd imagine based on the amount of advertising they do it's at least held steady. And then there's the many millions of investment dollars they received before that. $2 million is not even a slap on the wrist. It's like blowing in their ear gently.
As far as Lumosity believing their own claims, first this is not a mom and pop store. They have the resources to know for sure whether or not it's true, and they have a duty to find that out before making claims. Second, I don't buy it. Anybody with half a brain knows it's baloney.
Lastly, as far as I can see they're not being forced to make amends to the customers they ripped off, nor to make public apologies for false claims AND if they can gin up some bullshit study to support their claims (shouldn't be hard with their resources), they can continue making them.
Also the whole time this lawsuit has been going on, I've been hearing claims that don't differ much from the ones in violation on NPR constantly. Just enough to skirt the law.
Heavy handed my left foot.
2/24 is 8%. How would you like to be fined 8% of your yearly salary?
Make $100k as a developer? $8k please!
Good thing I'm not blowing gently in your other ear; that would be 16 thou.
There seems to be evidence that mental activity saves off cognitive decline --- just not that it can cure Alzheimer's and such.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100302151242.ht...
http://healthland.time.com/2013/04/15/mental-exercises-are-m...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201403... (#6 - brain training games)
http://www.newsmax.com/Health/Health-News/mental-activity-de...
http://www.healthcentral.com/alzheimers/c/42/151976/exercisi...
It might be done to make an example out of them. Also imo a more accurate comparison would be Dr. Oz and the "wonder powder" he advertises
Yes, and they trumpeted it several times per day in a variety of advertising channels
While the belief may exist, they had deceptive ads turned to 11. You don't see puzzles or similar product being advertised almost 24/7 on tv.
I think the FTC is not being heavy handed at all
Also their approach to metrics was too unscientific.
I assume that you know that there is no evidence for carrots improving vision.
Exactly. Want to tell carrots? Go ahead. Want to sell carrots by telling people with failing sight that it will improve their vision, and talk them into a monthly fee for carrot delivery? You'd better have some research to back that up.
However, if they state that there are medical studies showing that carrots improve your vision, then those claims should be checked out and action taken if not true.
Silicon Valley is confusing pseudo-science with innovation[0]
> I don’t think all the VC firms that are moving into the space know what they’re doing — so I think you only need a couple of nasty failures to get them to pull back. Take Pathway Genomics, for instance, which was selling a test that was supposed to tell you if you had cancer. I say "supposed to" because it turns out no one — including Pathway Genomics itself — had done any research whatsoever to determine the test actually did what it said it did. The company sold the test directly to patients through a regulatory loophole, and after we wrote about it, the FDA got wind and told them to knock it off. But Pathway had investors: Edelson Technology Partners, Founders Fund, IBM Watson Group. You’ll notice these are not health care firms.
In the next couple of years, we're probably going to see companies like Nootrobox, Stemcentrx, and Theranos go belly up, after which SV investor interest in the healthcare industry will dry up, just as it did in the energy industry after the late 2000s.
0: http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/29/10642070/2015-theranos-ve...
More likely, what will happen is the the BS artists that smell money will go away (and their financiers) leaving the field again to those that were active there before a few high profile exits brought the smell of blood.
On the other hand, you could make exactly the same claims ("1) improve performance on everyday tasks, in school, at work, and in athletics; 2) delay age-related cognitive decline and protect against mild cognitive impairment, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease; and 3) reduce cognitive impairment associated with health conditions, including stroke, traumatic brain injury, PTSD, ADHD, the side effects of chemotherapy, and Turner syndrome, and that scientific studies proved these benefits") about an "herbal supplement" and you'd be legally in the clear. Why is Lumosity's suite of product offerings more similar to prescription medicine (heavily regulated) than to dodgy supplements that might or might not contain mostly meth (basically unregulated)?
http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/7/302/302ra136 http://www.esmo.org/Conferences/Past-Conferences/European-Ca...
While the second link is only phase 1, those are some impressive numbers.
Finally, their clinical trials page (http://stemcentrx.com/clinical-trials.html) shows two Pfizer collaborations, pretty sure Pfizer has a pretty good pulse on these things.
> The company says that they’re doing 150 xenografts a day (!) But their rationale is that trying to culture CSCs in vitro runs the risk of having them change character too much, making any assays using them unreliable. My guess is that they’re right about that, but my worry is that xenograft tumors themselves are already unreliable enough to cause trouble (and I have no idea of what happens to them after you “passage” them through multiple animals). Xenograft models are, of course, well known in oncology drug discovery, but one of the things that’s well known about them is that they’re the pure example of “necessary but nowhere near sufficient”. If your drug fails in a xenograft, it will probably fail in the clinic. But if your drug works in a xenograft, it will probably fail in the clinic, too. The odds get better, but they go from “extremely likely not to work” to “pretty likely not to work”, and you take what you can get in this business.
> So how’s Stemcentrx doing in their cell hunt? They’re not going to tell Technology Review, naturally, but as the article mentions, the entire CSC hypothesis has been taking some hits recently. It’s still very much an open question. How many tumor types are driven by stem cells, whether they can be targeted (and how), how to tell when such an approach is indicated at all – there are a lot of open questions. It seems very likely that there are cell types inside a given tumor population that are more aggressive and likely to spread, but whether that narrows down to a particular stem cell group, I don’t know. What if there are 234 cell types in some particular tumor, and (say) fourteen of them are the ones to really worry about? What then? Will there be a common mechanism to target these, or not?
0: https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/09/28/verastem-sha...
1: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2015/09/09/cha...
0: http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/03/founder-stories-lumositys-m...
> Prior to founding Lumosity, Michael was a neuroscience PhD student at Stanford University.
> Michael graduated from Princeton University with an A.B. in Psychology.
Lumosity seems like one of those companies that bit off more than it could chew. Then, to fulfill investor expectations, they started to engage in shady and unethical sales practices.
There are outliers for which I wouldn't quite say "not to be trusted" like Dollar Shave Club and Blue Apron, but even in those cases you are, IMO, overpaying for a vanishingly small amount of convenience.
I think it holds up pretty well though that putting a lot of effort into advertising via "live reads" on radio and podcasts is a negative indicator as to how much you can trust a company.
...I listen to too many podcasts.
Now I think of stamps.com as the literal devil -- it might be possible to get a good deal, but you really better know what you've agreed to.
I munch on bacon, send mail using normal stamps, have my lawyer do my complex legal work for me, do my websites myself in vim, read books the physical paper way, and sleep on a mattress that is of a major brand (and will be probably replaced with either a memory foam or natural latex from one of the smaller manufacturers that aren't Casper), and I wear underwear like Fruit of the Loom or Hanes.
I also know no one that does business with ANY of those companies. I'm pretty sure I'm also not in some sort of minority bubble.
Who exactly is the market for these businesses? Is this some sort of gigantic Dot-Bomb 2.0 and within the next 5 years none of these companies will still or can exist?
I am not in the states and I can't get most of the services. I wish they would at least do regional podcasting advertising. A startup opportunity :)
Granted, "overpay" is somewhat relative and DSC is still better than paying for Gillette or whatever.
Many of the pro-brain-training camp have already begun to shift the goal posts. First it was 'simple games increase IQ,' which turned out to be difficult to prove when well controlled studies were performed. Now it's more along the lines of 'These simple games might have preventative effects against age related declines!,' which is an even harder claim to actually prove given the difficulties performing well controlled studies on aged participants.
In the cognitive science world, if we discovered a solid far transfer paradigm, especially one which transferred to something like G(eneral Intelligence), it would be our anti-baldness pill\flying car\4-day cellphone battery. People thought that these working memory transfer effects were the real deal and got very excited about it, money poured in, and the water got muddied by all these scientists with conflicts.
I obviously don't put much stock in working memory training. I wish it worked like they said, but I don't think it does. If far-transfer shows up at all, it's tiny, and doesn't persist after delay.
" The 20 studies included here were all completed between 2008 and 2013....Sample sizes of treatment groups varied between 7 and 36 participants, and control groups between 8 and 43"
"net effect of n-back training on Gf outcome measures, about the equivalent of 3–4 points on a standardized IQ test"
ie: very small groups, tiny effect. Sounds dubious to me, like much research in the social "sciences"
Improving fluid intelligence with training on working memory:a meta-analysis http://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/au-e...https://www.dropbox.com/s/084fvteji1tyz8t/2015-schwaighofer....
Melby-Lervag & Hulme, 2013, is also pretty damning.
While I wouldn't trade my current smartphone for one of those, I do miss the lack of battery anxiety, and wish the manufacturers would make models for those of us who aren't obsessed with thinness. An iPhone 6 at 5/8" (15mm) would be awesome.
Anyway, one day someone called into the show and asked about this product that they advertised, and the host stammered a bit and basically said "well, yeah that's not true but it's all just for fun, a fun gift for people maybe". Was funny to hear him trying to justify this obvious scam because they happened to advertise with the station, even though the entire premise of the show was calling bullshit on other phony product claims.
That said, there does appear to be some political leaning to NPR, but it's not nearly as bad as the cable news outlets.
It's obviously vaguely promising cognitive gains, but it manages to talk around it extremely well.
Coffee has proven to make brain work better. But it's only temporary.
LSD...well, I've never tried it, but people swear by it. Not sure if scientists would be allowed to try it on test cases.
So does that mean after paying this fine, Lumosity is in financial trouble?
Besides, these fines aren't based on actual damage to society. I suspect the total is high because Pharma would laugh at a $2M fine, and the FDA wants to keep their teeth.
It seemed ED to be more of a "We will give you a chance to raise an arbitrary number over time if you pay us" and heavy marketing ploy.
Seems like if cow clicker got viral and took peoples money.
Oh, and then there's this bit:
>The complaint also charges the defendants with failing to disclose that some consumer testimonials featured on the website had been solicited through contests that promised significant prizes, including a free iPad, a lifetime Lumosity subscription, and a round-trip to San Francisco.
Classic huckster move, not surprised, glad they got caught, etc.
Cancelling took a couple of emails and threat to dispute the CC charge.
Hooray for FTC!
Now that is a reason I can understand. But fining them on the basis of questionable claims -- almost every product in the world does that.
I always assumed that brain training apps are just like that. What "did not have the science" really mean in this case? Did they find some errors in peer-reviewed papers these companies have published? Or they just faked it all?
Active Memory (From ABC), was working really closely with a team of neuroscientists out of Australia. Lots of their data goes directly into research programs. Here's the blurb from their site:
"Active Memory has been developed in partnership with the University of Melbourne and the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health. The program is built on a breakthrough statistical model that examines your game results and serves up a customised training schedule that challenges your brain at just the right level of difficulty. Most importantly, the program aims to measure the changes that are happening to your cognition, based on your training. Critically, your participation in Active Memory will contribute to one of the largest studies of its kind into brain training and its potential health benefits."
Was a really great team to work with. Had a very different angle from Luminosity and was held to very strict advertising controls through being a part of ABCs commercial arm.
I really hope the FTC doesn't get it. It's a conflict of interest that permeates local law enforcement all across America.
Would have been a really neat to revisit my academic passion, but as I started to read papers that had been published on their product, I wasn't convinced of its efficacy. That, and all of the studies used people with real problems, and they're marketing it to the general population as a way to "train" your brain, which feels wrong to me.
I found Lumosity in 2009-2010 and played occasionally, eventually converting to a paid membership in 2012-2013 and playing weekly on desktop and iOS.
I was even quite proud to make it to the 98th percentile of all players [1]. (For reference, that's statistically consistent with my score on a standardized IQ test.)
Eventually something felt off about the scoring. At one point I distinctly recall them catching flack for changing the algorithm to boost you higher for playing more without necessarily playing better.
What I found anecdotally was that playing their games while I was in a distracted state would help me regain focus to the point where I could work on a cognitively challenging task, like a programming project, math problems, etc. afterward that I wouldn't have been able to before playing. I don't claim (or know) whether any longterm difference was made, but I also didn't join for that reason and never really cared about that. Lumosity games gave me a brain reset not dissimilar to a short meditation.
I don't know the science behind this idea, and perhaps it's purely placebo effect, but personally Lumosity was helpful to my life. That was my experience.
1: https://twitter.com/kicksopenminds/status/426760502128041984
I definitely noticed when they toned down the claims, but even then I was surprised they were still going...
+1 FTC
Confront that with the transcript in the original FTC complaint (from page 7):
https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/160105lumos...
My local entertainment mediums were spammed with this ad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGjr_CJ2n98
for a solid year or two. The vapid, cultish, yet manic grin. The "Now, with Neuroscience(tm)!". The recursive caricature of a borderline mentally retarded person who now feels that everything is right in the world because she's paid tithe to the Intelligence Authorities. The notion that the commercial is not only defrauding, but actively mocking anyone too uneducated or uncritical or low-self-confidence, to doubt their claims. The several percent of her life it's implied she's supposed to spend engaging in ritual flagellation with repetitive, poorly designed games, in order to diminish the shaming at not 'working on my mind'.
It is the singular most offensive scumbag commercial advertisement that comes to mind. It brings on vivid fantasies of punching the smug grin off of this woman, even though I know intellectually she's just a professional actress, and I'm a pacifist.
0. http://longevity3.stanford.edu/blog/2014/10/15/the-consensus...
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-training-doe...
http://greyenlightenment.com/brain-training-doesnt-make-you-...
'Brain training' no better than 'penis enhancement'...just as dubious
http://www.rose-hulman.edu/news/academics/2012/rose-hulman-n...
[0]: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/04/25/0801268105.full...
[1]: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
NIH Toolbox (for researchers) http://www.nihtoolbox.org/Pages/default.aspx
Mindprint Learning (which has the Penn CNB for children) https://mindprintlearning.com/
Brain Resource (which has the Web Neuro for adults) http://www.brainresource.com/mybrainsolutions/personal
On the other hand, it's hard to judge the value of an encryption app, or a brain training program, because the true value is often hidden. It's difficult to tell, at least for the average consumer whether an encryption app works. There might be signs for the more immediately knowledgeable ('why won't the passwords take special characters, or passwords longer than 12 characters?'), but it's usually a small group.
Unfortunately, this is probably going to make it harder for the latter kind of company to grow quickly, because trust takes time to develop. I don't just need to trust that my data will be safe - the entire value of the product depends on my trust that it does what it says.
I have no idea if lumosity does what it claimed, but I doubt I could easily tell in a day or two. Contrast that with instagram or a better computer - the value (however large or small) is obvious.
I believe it's in that interview that she says that these kinds of "brain training" games are less effective than just normal games built for fun at developing any kind of cognitive ability. I tried Lumosity out for a trial period to see what it was about, but the games were overly simplistic and not well-designed from a fun standpoint. I also felt like I was hitting 90% of their specific "categories" of games with a single game like Starcraft 2, except a game like Starcraft 2 actually forces you to engage the thinking part of your brain if you want to perform at any decent level.
At first glance, it seems like the answer is yes because the FDA action signals that outrageous, unprovable claims do not give offer a competitive advantage. But by making FDA “experts” the sole arbiter of truth, ideas outside the mainstream are harder to pursue. Some people probably really did benefit from the Luminosity, but now it’s much harder to figure out why. Note that the FDA also makes it harder on people like Consumer Reports, Cochrane Reviews, etc. who get fewer donations and customers because much of what they could be doing competes with the FDA’s government-subsidized service.
For those who don't know- Lumosity is killing it. They can easily pay this fine with their enormous profits.
Shit doesn't add up.
If we assume that brain games work, why aren't we comparing this to sudoku, Tetris, trivial pursuit or memory? Or simply reading a book, doing homework?
It's not like real life is low on intellectual challenges and if brain training is really transferable, shouldn't solving math problems be transferable too?
[1] http://www.pjstar.com/article/20151230/OPINION/151239951
