Cambridge Brain Sciences (Free alternative to Lumosity)

"The Cambridge Brain Sciences concept was developed by Dr. Adam Hampshire and Dr. Adrian M. Owen during their time at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge UK, with a grant from MRC Technology's Development Gap Fund. Doctors Hampshire and Owen have now moved to the Brain and Mind Institute at the University of Western Ontario in Canada where they are continuing to develop the concept under the same name with the support of WORLDiscoveries.

The concept has two aims:

1) To provide a freely available web-based platform for members of the public and the wider scientific community to assess their cognitive function using rigorously tested and scientifically proven tests of memory, attention, reasoning and planning. The tests made available on the site have been used in scientific studies of brain function and cognition by scientific studies of brain function by Dr. Owen and Dr. Hampshire and have been described in many peer-reviewed scientific publications in leading academic journals.

Many of the tests are variants on paradigms that have been used in functional neuroimaging studies (using PET and fMRI) to show how cognitive functions such as memory, planning and attention are mediated by specific regions of the brain (a field colloquially known as 'brain mapping'). In other studies, they have been used to investigate why some of these cognitive functions become impaired in disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and schizophrenia and after traumatic brain damage caused by injuries to the head. An additional interest of the team is how performance on these tests (and the cognitive processes that they measure) improves over time with training.

By making these tests widely and freely available, Cambridge Brain Sciences Inc aims to further our understanding of human cognition with a view to mediating against the effects of brain damage and disease.

2) To provide a web-based platform (CBSTrials.com) for the controlled assessment of cognitive function in targeted groups of individuals for the purposes of scientific investigation, including clinical and pharmaceutical trials. The Cambridge Brain Sciences platform has already been used by one major pharmaceutical company to conduct an entirely web-based trial of a novel compound. Furthermore, ~20 collaborative trials involving various patient groups and controls are currently underway using the CBSTrials.com web site. If you would like further information about using Cambridge Brain Sciences for your own trials then please contact Cambridge Brain Sciences Inc. "

Check out Cambridge Brain Sciences Inc.