Stage I – Initiation
“I remembered my friend’s birthday, which is good.”
Friend, are you troubled by persistent waking blackouts? Do you tremble and shudder and flicker out of consciousness when asked to recall basic facts about your acquaintances? Does your right eye fill with blood whenever you have to try to remember your PIN? Let Lumosity patch over those mysterious missing blank spots in your sick and addled mind.
“Lumosity: Improving your brain through the science of neuroplasticity, but in a way that just feels like games.”
Lumosity: you can trust us. It doesn’t hurt. It’s normal. It feels normal. Good and normal. Just like a game. Won’t feel a thing. It’s normal, and you’re normal, and your brain is working better now than it was before. Before was bad. Now is good.
Stage II – The Audit
“Going to the gym is easy. Any part of your body, you can move it. But you can’t move your brain. Until now. Now they can. At this stage it’s not, it’s not unusual if you, when you close your eyes, it doesn’t make a difference. I still see everything. I close my eyes and I can still see where I’m going. I open my eyes and I can see everything, but now I see what isn’t there, too. I see the white arms growing out of my head. I see the air squares. I see them. Soon I’ll see through them.”
Stage III – Saturation
“It just seems like games, but it’s serious brain training. It was a game, and all I had to do was play. Now it’s not games. It’s science, and it’s real, and I can see in fourteen different directions at once. I don’t need my throat anymore. I had to sleep before, but I don’t know. I can lay in bed in a dark room, but in my mind, it’s a — I’m more than a complete galaxy in my own right. Can you hear the level of frequency I’m at? I will never get sick again. People fear what they don’t understand, but now I understand everything.”
Stage IV – Synergy/Assimilation
Stage V – Full Compliance
Tags: “neuroplasticity”, conspiracy theories, lumosity, science, scientology, suspiciously vague ad campaigns
Wow, it all makes sense. It’s only a matter of time before Hallmark starts making belated birthday cards that say, “Sorry, friend, but you should at least be glad I didn’t allow myself to be led down that goddamn slippery slope!”
my mind is a star, my mind is an engine of being
space and life and matter are distractions
i have seen the end of time
You never should have posted this. We’re all in danger, now. Now they know – they know that YOU know, and we toasties know that they know that you know.
I hope you’re posting from a secure location. Don’t answer the door if they knock. And they never knock.
Isn’t neuroplasicity a fancy way of saying, ‘ learning stuff’?
Their spokesmodels mispronounced “neuroplastination” on the first try, and on review they decided that version might win more converts.
After all, it’s not like any of the customers complain.
My 93-year-old Canadian granny has maintained her neuroplasticity through crossword puzzles and knitting during hockey games, and she actually went from being Catholic to being a hippy-dippy Unitarian. So, that’s how you stay sharp and get out from under religion’s thumb, I guess.
Clearly someone needs to start a religion based on crosswords, knitting, and brain science. With possibly a splinter sect devoted to filet crochet, which looks like knitting AND crosswords all at the same time.
Suckers haven’t even gotten me past initiation stage. I just walked right up to an executive at my work who I’ve met several times and with whom I am scheduled to meet for drinks tonight, looked him right in the eye, shook his hand, told him it was nice to meet him and was totally unphased by his baffled stares. Come at me, lumosity.
I was more satisfied than I should admit to being when Katie left Tom.
All the wacky stuff reported about during her pregnancy really weirded me out.
So my boyfriend was raised by Scientologists, and thus he is whatever the Scientology version of Catholic Confirmation is. He gets THE MOST ABSURD THINGS in the mail; he can’t “unsubscribe” from the mailing list because then he might get “declared” and his family won’t be able to speak to him. But the things he gets in the mail? Amazing. So amazing. I should scan them and put them on the internet.
Tumblr is waiting for you.
Yes. Yes, you should.
So it is *possible* to be a Scientology apostate, it’s just the cost of not being continually hounded is social exile?
Psychiatry Kills; Neuroplasticity Resurrects.
Hah hah, very funny Mallory. But to be real now, Luminosity is all it claims to be. Before I did Luminosity, my mind had a Hollow Place of disappearing memories. I had no control. Because you know humans don’t use 90% of their brains, and that was me. Before.
Since then Luminosity has empowered me to access the greater depths of myself and Control the Hollow Place. With the help of Real Neuroscience I have sought the truth that always rested within the 90% of me and I am so very happy. Don’t you want to be happy? Mallory?
…I am still working to attain the stage of Lumosity where I am able to, using only my mind, retroactively replace all of my written instances of “Luminosity” with “Lumosity”–particularly on pages where the name is literally written two inches away in the web address. But all in good time.
So is this a sponsored post, or?
I was a particle, now I’m a wave! Thanks to Lumosity, I am pure light. I am Schrodinger’s cat. I no longer need verbs.
……………….Thank you, this is perfect.
but how many floating tone arms will I have?
That is either a great guitar player joke or a great typo (or, version three: a great joke I don’t get) and either way, uh, I like you.
it is a scientology joke. I have no idea what a floating tone arm would be in the context of guitar playing, but to be fair I also have no idea what it means in the context of scientology, just that that guy is really excited about them.
Whoa. REALLY excited. Like, SO excited. I want whatever that guy has.
I was thinking of the little handle at the bridge of a guitar where you grab it and make your guitar go “waaaaaaooooooooooohhhhhhhhhh” all My-Bloody-Valentine-style. It’s called a lot of things — whammy bar, tremelo arm — and I’ve heard it called a tone arm, too.
Though to be fair, I think I got it confused with the tone arm of a record player.
I would be excited to have lots of either of those, but overall I feel that I have failed at commenting and should probably receive some sort of punishment.
Please don’t make me watch that video again.
So I read this post and agreed with it (that women in the glasses terrifies me) and WHAT SHOULD HAPPEN NEXT but Lumosity ads started appearing in front of all my youtube videos! WITH THE GLASSES WOMAN! I will shortly be retreating to my underground bunk where the Lumosity mafia can never find me.
Youtube is now recommending the Scientology channel for me. : /
I am also getting lumosity ads everywhere. There’s even one on the toast!
Speaking of terrifying ads, has anyone seen the Dove (I think it was Dove, I’m weirdly immune to remembering the actual product being sold by an advert) ad about the ‘beauty patch’? They present it as a science experiment where women are given a patch to wear that makes them more beautiful, and I was watching it with a mounting sense of ‘Holy crap, either cosmetics companies have reached a new level of shamelessness in selling products that clearly don’t actually work, or this is the beginning of a sinister mind-control programme’. Then of course at the end they revealed the patch doesn’t actually work because You Were Beautiful All Along, but it was a close call.
My favorite line is “It’s easy to exercise my body, but hard to exercise my mind” or somesuch, I’m not rewatching the ad. But, really? I have the opposite problem, who are these people?