Brainy

Taking a break from her homework, an undergrad fires up a pinball challenge on her smartphone while her roommate toys with a robot factory game. But this is about more than procrastination: They’re using Lumosity, an online brain-training program. For the second year in a row, this neuroscience-based company has produced a list of “America’s Smartest Colleges” by analyzing the game performance of tens of thousands of students at almost 500 universities. Carnegie Mellon’s students have earned the university the #5 slot in Lumosity’s annual rankings, beating every Ivy League school except Princeton and jumping a dozen places since last year.
—Janet Jay (DC’07)