Eau Claire ranked 92nd smartest city in America?

Eric Koeppel |

From “most holiday spirit” to “best cities for cheapskates” it seems like Eau Claire has been in a lot of lists lately, hasn’t it? Well, here’s another one. Using their online brain-performance program, Lumosity, Lumos Labs conducted a study to determine the 100 brainiest cities in America, and guess who made the cut? Eau Claire (#92 represent)!

The list is based on 2.4 million users and ranks U.S. cities by their cognitive performance in five areas: memory, processing speed, flexibility, attention, and problem solving. So I guess they skipped the beer and cheese consumption categories?

Not surprisingly, however, many of the cities and towns on the list are college towns; Ithica, NY came in first place. And included in the list are nine Wisconsin towns: Madison (#8), Appleton (#12), La Crosse (#36), Stevens Point (#40), Sheboygan (#48), Oshkosh (#51), Fond du Lac (#54), Wisconsin Rapids (#83), and Eau Claire (#92). Hey, that’s us!

Another table from the study shows the top 20 smartest large metros (over 1 million people) and features Milwaukee at #1 and Minneapolis-St. Paul at #2 (we win). A breakdown of the results for each cognitive area also shows that Appleton took first place in both the attention and memory categories. How do you like them apples?

Well, there you have it. Apparently we’re smart, happy cheapskates with a lot of holiday spirit. I’ll take it.