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My parents swear by Luminosity, are they wasting their time?

Yes - for the most part improvements in those memory games improve... performance on those memory games. There is a paper showing that Luminosity specifically doesn't help.[0]

Our brains are really good at learning to optimize for a very specific task.

edit: reference

[0] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131514...

As an example of that task specificity, for master level chess players, they are better than amateurs and novices at memorising real chess board layouts, but not significantly better at scrambled board layouts.

http://theinvisiblegorilla.com/blog/2012/02/15/how-experts-r...

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