Cognitive Software Identifies America's Brainiest Cities

Hugh Pickens writes "We are often told that the smartest cities and nations do the best and economists typically measure smart cities by education level, calculating the cities or metros with the largest percentage of college grads or the largest shares of adults with advanced degrees. Now Richard Florida writes that a new metric developed by Lumos Labs based on their cognitive training and tracking software Lumosity seeks to track "brain performance" or cognitive capacity of cities in a more direct way by measuring the cognitive performance of more than one million users in the United States who use their games against their location using IP geolocation software. Lumosity's website offers forty games designed to sharpen a wide range of cognitive skills. Individual scores were recorded in five key cognitive areas: memory, processing speed, flexibility, attention, and problem solving.The data was normalized into a basic brain performance index controlling for age and gender. The results are shown on a map from Zara Matheson of the Martin Prosperity Institute that shows the brainy metro index across US metro areas with the top five brainy clusters in Charlottesville Virginia, Lafayette Indiana, Anchorage Alaska, Madison Wisconsin, and the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose area. The result is not driven principally by college students, according to Daniel Sternberg, the Lumosity data scientist who developed the metro brain performance measure. 'Since our analysis controlled for age, the reason they score well is not simply that they have a lot of young people,' says Sternberg. 'Instead, our analysis seems to show that users living in university communities tend to perform better than users of the same age in other locations.'"

Comments

Smarter - less conservative and religious

[Anonymous Coward]

Because college towns tend to have larger concentrations of progressives and secularists, their cognitive abilities will be higher. Obvious conclusion is obvious.

The results disprove the study

[cpu6502]

"Charlottesville VA, Lafayette IN, Anchorage AK, Madison WI, and the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose"??? Yes maybe SF/Oakland but not Charlottesville which is redneck territory. Or Anchorage.

The place with the highest concentration of iPhones and iPads is located between Baltimore and D.C. That's where I would expect to find the most intelligent people. Also Silicon Valley CA and Seattle WA.

Holy crap look at the Southeast

[circletimessquare]

I have heritage from the South and North.

I have ancestors who were soldiers in the Confederacy, and I have ancestors who were soldiers in the Union.

So I am speaking against my own blood here.

But I'm sorry, the Southern US has been a political and intellectual dead weight drag on this country since its founding.

Sometimes I wish the Confederacy won their independence, were allowed to descend to the impoverished nation status they so fervently desire. Go ahead, let them embrace economically and socially illiterate conservative policies they favor with religious (but not intellectual) fervor on their own. Enjoy your race to join Haiti on the development index.

These states suck up so much federal financial largesse from the West and East Coast (hypocrites) and in return we get nothing but backasswards social and political WHARGARBBBLE.

Canada, could you absorb some Northern US states please? I live in New York State. I feel more in common in terms of social and political values with Canadians than I do with Dixie. I know I am not alone.

Let's drop this dead weight Southern anchor and achieve greatness.

Can we build a wall?