Douglas Sternberg at Lumosity.com:

Economists and urban researchers tend to analyze the collective intelligence of cities based on socioeconomic variables like income and education levels. Last year, Lumosity published its first Smartest Cities rankings based on our own database of users’ performance on cognitive training exercises. Our 2012 rankings measured the cognitive performance of over a million people around the country. The 2013 rankings are based on data from nearly three times as many people, with over 3 million users included in the study. Given the larger scale, this year we introduce additional and more granular rankings, including Core-Based Statistical Areas (CBSAs, also known as Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas), Combined Statistical Areas, and the direct city and state output by the IP geolocation database, in addition to the Designated Marketing Areas used in the 2012 list. We have also made some adjustments to our methods that we hope will improve the validity and reliability of our results, and provide new lists separated by age group. This whitepaper provides information about the methods employed in creating the rankings, along with summary tables. Our data is also available in the form of an interactive map that makes it easy to explore how cognitive performance varies geographically across the United States. The full rankings for CBSAs are provided in the appendix of this document. If you are a researcher who is interested in using the complete set of aggregated scores and rankings for your own research and analysis, please contact us.