Are you famil­iar with men­tal rota­tion? As the name indi­cates it refers to mov­ing things around in your head. It is one of the numer­ous visu­ospa­tial skills that humans have.

Let’s take an exam­ple. Can you pic­ture in your head an arrow point­ing to the right? Now, turn this arrow so it points to the left. Done? You have just per­formed a men­tal rota­tion. Although it is rare to con­sciously imag­ine objects mov­ing, peo­ple auto­mat­i­cally use this abil­ity when they read maps, use tools, play chess, arrange fur­ni­ture, drive in traf­fic, etc.

Men­tal rota­tion relies mostly on the pari­etal areas of your brain (yel­low sec­tion in the brain image above).

Here is a brain exer­cise to stim­u­late your men­tal rota­tion skills.

• The top shape is your model.
• Among the 3 shapes below the model, only one matches the model. To fig­ure out which one does you will prob­a­bly have to move the shapes around in your head.
• Move the shapes from left to right or right to left but DO NOT FLIP them around.

First set

Sec­ond set

Third Set

To see the cor­rect answers click here: Read the rest of this entry »

With World Alzheimer’s Day com­ing up (Sept 21st), it seemed impor­tant to make sense of the sci­en­tific study pub­lished this month that has trig­gered head­lines claim­ing that “Doing puz­zles could speed up demen­tia”, “Brain Exer­cise may worsen exist­ing Alzheimer’s” and even explain­ing to read­ers “Why you shouldn’t play men­tally stim­u­lat­ing games”.

What is the mat­ter?  Pre­vi­ous stud­ies had shown it to be quite clear that peo­ple who lead a men­tally or cog­ni­tively stim­u­lat­ing life also tend to:

a) ben­e­fit from improved think­ing and over­all cog­ni­tive func­tion­ing (delayed cog­ni­tive decline)

b) have reduced risks of man­i­fest­ing Alzheimer’s dis­ease symptoms

The new study, pub­lished in Neu­rol­ogy by Dr. Wil­son from the Rush Alzheimer’s Dis­ease Cen­ter fol­lowed more than 2,000 indi­vid­u­als 65 and over for 12 years. How often they par­tic­i­pated in cog­ni­tive activ­i­ties such as read­ing (book, mag­a­zines, news­pa­pers), play­ing games (cards, cross­words, etc.), watch­ing TV and going to a museum was first assessed. Each indi­vid­ual received a score on this cog­ni­tive activ­ity scale. Six years later clin­i­cal eval­u­a­tion was con­ducted to deter­mine who was still highly func­tion­ing (all indi­vid­u­als started demen­tia free), who was suf­fer­ing from mild cog­ni­tive impair­ment and who had Alzheimer Dis­ease.  The cog­ni­tive decline of indi­vid­u­als in these three cat­e­gories (1,157 par­tic­i­pants total) was then assessed over an aver­age of 6 years.

This study is dif­fer­ent from the pre­vi­ous ones show­ing that healthy peo­ple who are cog­ni­tively active have lower risks of devel­op­ing demen­tia for one major rea­son: It assessed the fate of cog­ni­tively active indi­vid­u­als who have been diag­nosed with dementia.

This stresses an impor­tant point: cog­ni­tive activ­ity helps delay the emer­gence of demen­tia but doesn’t pre­vent it completely.

The results of the study con­firmed that Read the rest of this entry »

In spite of the recent eco­nomic down­turn, rev­enues for dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies to assess, enhance and treat cog­ni­tion, or dig­i­tal brain health and fit­ness tools, grew 35% in 2009. “The con­ver­gence of demo­graphic and pol­icy trends with cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science dis­cov­er­ies and tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion is giv­ing birth to a nascent mar­ket­place that can fun­da­men­tally trans­form what brain health is, how it is mea­sured, and how it is done,” says Alvaro Fer­nan­dez, mem­ber of the World Eco­nomic Forum’s Coun­cil on the Aging Soci­ety and Editor-in-Chief of the report. “This ground­break­ing report can help pio­neers shape the emerg­ing toolkit to ben­e­fit an aging soci­ety that increas­ingly seeks new ways to enhance cog­ni­tive func­tion­al­ity and men­tal well­ness across the lifespan.”

“As the brain is thrust into the cen­ter of the health­care ecosys­tem, inno­v­a­tive cog­ni­tive health and brain fit­ness appli­ca­tions will play an increas­ingly impor­tant role in defin­ing neu­ro­cen­tric health,” adds Jake Duna­gan, Research Direc­tor at the Insti­tute For The Future.

Report: Trans­form­ing Brain Health with Dig­i­tal Tools to Assess, Enhance and Treat Cog­ni­tion across the Lifes­pan: The State of the Brain Fit­ness Mar­ket 2010.

A major­ity among the 1,900+ decision-makers and early-adopters sur­veyed said they trusted the effec­tive­ness of non-invasive options above inva­sive options to enhance crit­i­cal brain func­tion­al­ity. Pro­fes­sional and intel­lec­tual chal­lenges were rated very effec­tive by 61% of respon­dents, aer­o­bic exer­cise and read­ing books by 42%, med­i­ta­tion by 38%, com­put­er­ized brain train­ing by 26%, tak­ing pre­scrip­tion drugs by 13%, tak­ing sup­ple­ments by 12%, and self-medicating with drugs by 1%.

These are among the key find­ings of a 207-page mar­ket report released today by Sharp­Brains and pre­pared in col­lab­o­ra­tion with 24 lead­ing sci­en­tists and 10 inno­v­a­tive orga­ni­za­tions — the most com­pre­hen­sive such research study done to ana­lyze emerg­ing research, tech­nolo­gies and marketplace.

“We must do for brain health in the 21st cen­tury what we largely accom­plished in car­dio­vas­cu­lar health in the past cen­tury. It’s time to take sci­en­tific insights out of the lab and to iden­tify prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tions, mak­ing the main­te­nance of good brain fit­ness a pub­lic health pri­or­ity,” indi­cates William Reich­man, MD, Pres­i­dent and CEO of Baycrest.

Other Report High­lights are: Read the rest of this entry »

You may have already seen that our Teasers sec­tion con­tains not only our selec­tion of Top 50 Brain Teasers and Games, but also a reg­u­larly updated page with lat­est Games for the Brain.

Below you have the brain games and teasers we have added in 2008 so far. Ready?
– Octo­ber 2008: Top Brainy Haikus. Yours?.

- Sep­tem­ber 2008: What is going on with these pictures?.

- Sep­tem­ber 2008: 7 Brain­teasers for Job Interviews.

- August 2008: Can you use men­tal self rota­tion to read a map?.

- August 2008: Spot the Dif­fer­ences! how many are there?.

- July 2008 Read the rest of this entry »

Thank you to every­one who has writ­ten so many fun haikus over the sum­mer (fol­low­ing the post Top 25 Brain and Mind Haikus. Yours?). These are the 10 I have enjoyed the most:

(Also, Can you write a haiku describ­ing any­thing cross­ing your mind now? Remem­ber the sim­ple rules: write 3 lines, which don’t need to rhyme, con­tain­ing 5,7, and 5 syl­la­bles. You can leave your haiku as a com­ment below for extra points…)

—–
Top 10 Brainy Haikus — enjoy!

- Amit:

Love, col­lege, career.
A new world of tran­si­tions.
Will I sur­vive? Yes.

- Kathy:

My release tech­nique,
For­give, for­get, love all,
Med­i­tate on that!

- Alan:

Through the micro­scope,
slice of brain stains pink and blue,
the won­der of thought.

- Justin:

Justin the genieus
Must spell check the word genius
to post this Haiku

- Tim: Read the rest of this entry »

Today we intro­duce a  highly evolved ver­sion of brain teasers.

How quickly can you pro­vide the cor­rect answer to these 3 questions?

- 1) What is going on in these 2 pic­tures below?

- 2) what may explain it?

- 3) Is there some ele­ment out of place?

Ready. Set. Go! Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. Pas­cale Mich­e­lon recently shared with our read­ers which brain areas and cog­ni­tive func­tions are engaged as we solve the type of brain teaser known as Spot the Dif­fer­ence, where we have to find the dif­fer­ences between two ver­sions of one image: Read the rest of this entry »