Lumosity

Something I've noticed since I stopped being in university is that I've felt a lot dumber.  I mean, I'm still an intelligent person, but my memory has really gone downhill.  I can't remember people's names at first meeting anymore, and in fact a lot of the time I completely forget meeting someone and embarrassingly have to ask who they are again and they're like "you don't remember me?"  I used to be the person who never forgot a face or a name, and it feels wrong to have regressed so much.

I am quite certain the reason for my declining memory is that I just don't exercise it anymore.  All the way from kindergarten until I graduated university I was constantly memorizing and studying - whether it was doing Mad Minute math in grade 2, memorizing a song on the piano in grade 7, learning lines for a play in grade 11, or studying my butt off in university, I have always been actively exercising my mind.

But when I finished school and got a job I didn't really need to actively exercise my mind anymore so I didn't and things started to deteriorate.  I really want to improve my memory but I want to find a way to do it that doesn't feel like a chore.  I also want to find a way to do it that doesn't cost me a ton of money in case I end up not using it.

I thought I'd found the perfect solution with Luminosity.com - you've probably seen the commercials.  I made a free trial account and played a few of the games.  They were great - straight and to the point explanations, simple games that still exercised your memory.  And a year's subscription was only $6.70?  Awesome!  Sign me up!

But then I realized, as I was about to buy, that the $6.70 was a monthly fee rather than a flat yearly fee.  So now I am not sure of what to do.  Should I pay 80 bucks for a year's subscription to Luminosity (the 7 bucks/month is only available if you pay all at once - to pay by the month is 15 bucks/month)?  It seems like the best brain improvement site out there - the free games on other sites are a bit lame and have long intros and just don't seem to be the quality of the few Luminosity games I tried.

But if I pay 80 bucks, I need to make sure I get my 7 bucks/month worth of memory improvement.  I wish you could get a free month instead of only 3 days free because I can't judge in 3 days whether the site actually works and whether it's something I'll feel like I want to stick to.  And 80 bucks is a lot of money that I don't just want to throw away on something.  Plus, I won't be able to use the site at work so I'll only get to use it 2 weeks out of a month.  I sound like I'm making excuses but I'm just trying to figure out what to do.

How else can I improve my memory in a fun way that doesn't have a monthly fee?