slides: The Smartest Cities in New England

Thursday, June 07, 2012

Tracey Minkin, GoLocal Features Editor

How smart are New Englanders? And which cities are the smartest overall? A new ranking by San Francisco-based Lumos Labs has taken a fresh look at smartness with the benefit of tracking performance on its Lumosity online brain-training programs.

Instead of ranking cities based on factors such as number of educational institutions or investment in education, Lumos Labs developed what it calls "the largest database of human cognitive performance," with more than 20 million Lumosity users who have played the company's online games over 400 million times. That's a lot of data.

The smartest city in the country when it comes to cognition? Charlottesville, VA. For how New England's cities did when it came to brain-power (and how they ranked on the national list), see below.