Twin Cities are America's second-brainiest large metro, study says

The good news: We're second brainiest, the study says. The bad: We're somehow dumber than Milwaukee.

In an Atlantic Cities blog post, Richard Florida uses Lumosity data to conclude that MSP is the second-brainiest large metro in the country.

For those unfamiliar with it, Lumosity is a brain-performance program consisting of 40 games designed to train users in the areas of memory, attention, flexibility, speed of processing, and problem solving. Florida's study uses data from 2.4 million users.

"The data was normalized into a basic brain performance index controlling for age and gender," Florida writes. "Location data comes from the players' IP addresses, and scores were aggregated to the city and metro level."

Unsurprisingly, college towns like Ithaca, New York and Iowa City dominated the brainiest-cities ranking, but when the data was sorted to include only metros with more than one million people, Milwaukee and MSP rose to the top.

Here's Florida's top 20 brainiest-big-metros list:

Atlantic Cities

Milwaukee's top spot is something to keep in mind next time you're tempted to say, "Wisconsin is dumb."

-- Follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter at @atrupar. Got a tip? Drop him a line at arupar@citypages.com.