Marcus Yam for The New York Times
In this exercise at LearningRx in Upper Montclair, N.J., a trainee tosses a bean bag on the beat of a metronome while doing addition or recalling a sentence, one letter at a time.
IN the back room of a suburban storefront previously occupied by a yoga studio, Nick Vecchiarello, a 16-year-old from Glen Ridge, N.J., sits at a desk across from Kathryn Duch, a recent college graduate who wears a black shirt emblazoned with the words ?Brain Trainer.? Spread out on the desk are a dozen playing cards showing symbols of varying colors, shapes and sizes. Nick stares down, searching for three cards whose symbols match.
?Do you see it?? Ms. Duch asks encouragingly.
?Oh, man,? mutters Nick, his eyes shifting among the cards, looking for patterns.
Across the room, Nathan Veloric, 23, studies a list of numbers, looking for any two in a row that add up to nine. With tight-lipped determination, he scrawls a circle around one pair as his trainer holds a stopwatch to time him. Halfway through the 50 seconds allotted to complete the exercise, a ruckus comes from the center of the room.
?Nathan?s here!? shouts Vanessa Maia, another trainer. Approaching him with a teasing grin, she claps her hands like an annoying little sister. ?Distraction!? she shouts. ?Distraction!?
There is purpose behind the silliness. Ms. Maia is challenging the trainees to stay focused on their tasks in the face of whatever distractions may be out there, whether Twitter feeds, the latest Tumblr posting or old-fashioned classroom commotion.
On this Wednesday evening at the Upper Montclair, N.J., outlet of LearningRx, a chain of 83 ?brain training? franchises across the United States, the goal is to improve cognitive skills. LearningRx is one of a growing number of such commercial services ? some online, others offered by psychologists. Unlike traditional tutoring services that seek to help students master a subject, brain training purports to enhance comprehension and the ability to analyze and mentally manipulate concepts, images, sounds and instructions. In a word, it seeks to make students smarter.
?We measure every student pre- and post-training with a version of the Woodcock-Johnson general intelligence test,? said Ken Gibson, who began franchising LearningRx centers in 2003, and has data on more than 30,000 of the nearly 50,000 students who have been trained. ?The average gain on I.Q. is 15 points after 24 weeks of training, and 20 points in less than 32 weeks.?
The three other large cognitive training services ? Lumosity, Cogmed and Posit Science ? dance around the question of whether they truly raise I.Q. but do assert that they improve cognitive performance.
?Your brain, just brighter,? is the slogan of Lumosity, an online company that now has some 25 million registered members. According to its Web site, ?Our users have reported profound benefits that include: clearer and quicker thinking; faster problem-solving skills; increased alertness and awareness; better concentration at work or while driving; sharper memory for names, numbers and directions.?
Those results are achieved, the companies say, by repurposing cognitive tasks initially developed by psychologists as tests of mental abilities. With technical names like the antisaccade, the N-back and the complex working memory span task, the exercises are dressed up as games that become increasingly difficult as students gain mastery.
Conceived to appeal to adults, especially baby boomers looking to stanch the effects of aging, Lumosity now draws one-quarter of its audience from students between the ages of 11 and 21, according to Michael Scanlon, the company?s scientific director. ?I was taken aback that so much of our user base is so young,? he said. ?The particular audience I had in mind at the earliest stages of the company was my mother.? In response to requests from schoolteachers, the fee is now waived ? $15 a month ? for students in their classrooms. More than 1,000 teachers and 10,000 students have enrolled this year, Mr. Scanlon said.
For the one-on-one training at LearningRx, fees are decidedly higher, from about $80 to $90 an hour in Upper Montclair. The students come with learning disabilities, with grades they want to improve in a competitive academic environment, all with hopes of just being sharper.
TAYLOR WEBSTER, 16, trains daily for lacrosse with a personal coach. ?She has natural athletic ability,? said her mother, Samantha Newman-Webster. ?But it?s really through her training that she has been able to achieve to the point where she?s being sought out by college recruiters.? Would brain training, the family wondered, do for her grades what physical training did for her lacrosse game?
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