Laramie was included on a list of America’s 100 Smartest Cities. It was compiled by Lumosity, a company that makes online games meant to measure and improve the user’s mental fitness. Most cities on the list have research universities there.
Lumosity has a database of 40 million users, and ranked them based on various cognitive skills.
Lumosity Data Scientist Daniel Sternberg says people in Laramie performed better on games that challenged logical, working knowledge, compared with those measuring acquired knowledge.
“It’s likely to be tied to the experiences that they’ve had. I mean, that’s how we think about brain fitness, as well, is that you can actually, by training, improve that ability. But it’s not as directly about a set of knowledge that you’ve gained. It’s sort of about your ability to process information efficiently.”
But Sternberg says those skills aren’t unrelated.
“It’s like a chicken or egg problem, whether people who have had a background that led them to pursue education made them have better fluid intelligence abilities, or whether they just had them to begin with, and those are successful in an educational setting. I think there’s a lot of arguments either way about that.”
Although Laramie ranked 61st on the overall list of cities, it ranked in the top 50 for speed and memory exercises.