Learn­ing New Lan­guages Helps The Brain Grow (Med­ical News):

“The learn­ing of lan­guages allows the brain to stay “in shape”, by caus­ing cer­tain parts of the brain to grow, includ­ing the hip­pocam­pus and three areas of the cere­bral cortex…This find­ing came from sci­en­tists at Lund Uni­ver­sity, after exam­in­ing young recruits with a tal­ent for acquir­ing lan­guages who were able to speak in Ara­bic, Russ­ian, or Dari flu­ently after just 13 months of learn­ing, before which they had no knowl­edge of the lan­guages Read the rest of this entry »

The neu­ro­science of lan­guage, con­scious­ness, and com­mu­ni­ca­tion raises many fun­da­men­tal ques­tions, the answers to which con­sis­tently defy def­i­n­i­tion. For exam­ple: when we speak, where do our words come from? Our brain, or our mind? And what do we mean by mind? Sim­i­lar dilem­mas arise when we try to study the nature of con­scious­ness. What is it, and where is it? Is it gen­er­ated solely by neural activ­ity, or is it a sep­a­rate force that influ­ences the activ­ity of the brain? Hypothe­ses abound, but nobody seems to know for certain.

How­ever, we do have a few clues that illu­mi­nate the rela­tion­ship between the brain, the mind, and Read the rest of this entry »

Lan­guage in the brain is processed in the tem­po­ral lobes. These are on the sides of your brain, next to you temples.

Dif­fer­ent areas in the tem­po­ral lobe (mostly on the left side of your brain) deal with dif­fer­ent aspects of lan­guage. For instance, the Wer­nicke area is the one that allows you to under­stand words. The Broca area, on the other hand, is the one that allows you to pro­duce lan­guage or artic­u­late words.

Dam­age to Wernicke’s area causes Wernicke’s apha­sia, a con­di­tion in which peo­ple can hear lan­guage being spo­ken, but can­not under­stand it. Dam­age to Broca’s area causes Broca’s apha­sia, a con­di­tion in which peo­ple have trou­ble pro­duc­ing language.

Below you will find a brain exer­cise that tar­gets the neu­rons in your lan­guage areas. Read the rest of this entry »

In our Top 50 Brain Teasers post, we con­cluded with the challenge:

#50. Can you write a haiku describ­ing your expe­ri­ence doing some of the pre­vi­ous teasers? 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 for extra points…

There has been a num­ber of great and fun tak­ers so far…enjoy their haikus below! And Happy Thanksgiving.

- Terry says:

New infor­ma­tion
Syn­the­siz­ing my knowl­edge
A for­ward movement

- Frank says:

Painfully easy
Sig­nif­i­cantly harder
Men­tal stimulus

- Mark says:

I thought I did well
Then I reviewed my answers
I am retarded

- Chuck says: Read the rest of this entry »

Sev­eral recent sto­ries on brain train­ing and SharpBrains:

1) New brain games may improve mind fit­ness by Kevin Koster­man (U of Wis­con­sin Oshkosh’s Advance-Titan)

“Any­time we learn, we are train­ing, chang­ing, our brain,” Fer­nan­dez said. “The three key core ele­ments for effec­tive brain exer­cise are nov­elty, vari­ety and con­stant chal­lenge, sim­i­lar to increas­ing the level in machines we find in gyms.”

2) “Train­ing the Brain as pos­si­ble as Train­ing the Body”, جريدة النهار by Hanadi El Diri (Anna­har, one of the most pres­ti­gious papers in the Mid­dle East. The text is in Arabic.)

3) “Train your brain” by Mark Muck­en­fuss (The Press-Enterprise in River­side and San Bernardino)

“We can­not promise to peo­ple you will only keep get­ting bet­ter until you are 200 years old. But I think peo­ple still under­es­ti­mate how flex­i­ble the brain really is.”

The Smart­Brains [sic] pro­gram com­bines men­tal exer­cises with a stress reduc­tion pro­gram. Too much stress, says Fer­nan­dez, has been shown to be dam­ag­ing not only to per­for­mance, but to the brain itself.
With all of the avail­able pro­grams for stim­u­lat­ing the brain, he says, it is impor­tant to shop care­fully. A crit­i­cal ele­ment, he says, is how clients or par­tic­i­pants are evaluated.

“Make sure they have a cred­i­ble assess­ment that helps you find your strengths and weak­nesses and that they have pro­grams that address (those areas),” he says. “Assess­ments that give you 50 (as an age-equivalent grade) and a week later you’re 32, that’s not a valu­able assessment.”