Let us high­light a cou­ple of insight­ful and brief arti­cles in the New York Times and a very pow­er­ful analy­sis in The New York Review of Books; they pro­vide use­ful clues about Brain Cal­is­then­ics, Bilin­gual Brains, and Debunk­ing Myths on Men­tal Ill­ness. Read the rest of this entry »

Phys­i­cal fit­ness. Cognitive/ brain fit­ness. Both require nov­elty, vari­ety and chal­lenge. Pro­fes­sor Schlomo Breznitz, a sci­en­tific and busi­ness leader in the cog­ni­tive fit­ness field, explains why, elo­quently, below. Per­haps “we want change” really means “we need change”. Enjoy!

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Why are every­day life chal­lenges not suf­fi­cient to keep our brains fit?

– By Prof. Shlomo Breznitz

Often, when describ­ing the ben­e­fits of Mind­Fit to brain health, I am asked by peo­ple in the audi­ence whether this soft­ware is really needed. After all, so they argue, life pro­vides con­tin­ues cog­ni­tive chal­lenges, which should suf­fice for ensur­ing brain fit­ness. From the moment we wake up until we go to sleep our brains have to attend to com­plex stim­uli, plan many activ­i­ties, some of them quite com­plex, and carry us through what­ever the day offers. These tasks should pro­vide suf­fi­cient “brain exer­cise” with­out the need to engage in spe­cific men­tal workout.

This line of argu­ment sounds oddly famil­iar, since it is an exact dupli­ca­tion of claims made in the recent past against the need for phys­i­cal exer­cise. One jumps into the car and from the car and per­haps even climbs a few stairs before sit­ting in the chair, which should be enough to burn the calo­ries and keep fit.

Read the rest of this entry »

Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity is defined as “the abil­ity of the brain to rewire itself through experience”.

We typ­i­cally sum­ma­rize a lot of brain research by encour­ag­ing Sharp­Brains read­ers is to seek for nov­elty, vari­ety and chal­lenge, as guide­lines for “brain exer­cise” that will help build new con­nec­tions in the brain, force one to be mind­ful and pay atten­tion, improve abil­i­ties such as pattern-recognition, and in gen­eral con­tribute to life­long brain health.

A friend just sent an update on her amaz­ing expe­ri­ence in Namibia (the pic on the right shows the entrance to the Uni­ver­sity of Namibia) that shows how Travel and Engage­ment with mean­ing­ful projects can pro­vide superb men­tal stim­u­la­tion, or “brain exer­cise”. This is rel­e­vant at all ages, and we are encour­aged to see orga­ni­za­tions such as Civic Ven­tures and Elder­hos­tel that offer oppor­tu­ni­ties for baby boomers and older adults who want to main­tain active minds.

Try pic­tur­ing in your mind, as you read this, all her dif­fer­ent brain areas that are get­ting needed stim­u­la­tion through her Namibia experience.

UPDATE: my friend just wrote to expand on the “be mind­ful” angle by say­ing that “it def­i­nitely requires pur­pose­ful pro­cess­ing of the infor­ma­tion that you are con­sum­ing in order to make it a use­ful brain exer­cise. For exam­ple, I always try to jour­nal or write thought­ful emails about my expe­ri­ence in order to try to best under­stand it.” Great point.

With her per­mis­sion, here you have:

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Dear Friends,

I am just return­ing from Namibia and am buzzing with excite­ment about all of the oppor­tu­ni­ties for us to make an impact there when we return with our stu­dents next Spring.

Namibia is very dif­fer­ent than I expected. It was the last coun­try in Africa to gain inde­pen­dence from colo­nial­ism, gain­ing inde­pen­dence just 20 years ago. Thus, it is much more devel­oped than any African coun­try that I have vis­ited, with rel­a­tively good infra­struc­ture and no exist­ing debt. That said, the lega­cies of apartheid can still be felt in today’s soci­ety, and the peo­ple are very clearly deal­ing con­stantly with issues of race and iden­tity. One of the most inter­est­ing expe­ri­ences that I had was attend­ing a “braai” (the Namib­ian ver­sion of a bar­be­cue which basi­cally con­sists of Read the rest of this entry »

It is always good to stim­u­late our minds and to learn a bit about how our brains work. Here you have a selec­tion of the 50 Brain Teasers that peo­ple have enjoyed the most in our blog and speak­ing engagements.

Fun exper­i­ments on how our brains work

1. Do you think you know the col­ors?: try the Stroop Test.

2. Can you count?: Bas­ket­ball atten­tion exper­i­ment (Interactive).

3. Who is this?: A very impor­tant lit­tle guy (Interactive).

4. How is this pos­si­ble?.

5. Take the Senses Chal­lenge (Interactive).

6. Are there more brain con­nec­tions or leaves in the Ama­zon?.

Atten­tion

7. How are your divided atten­tion skills? check out “Inside and Out­side” (Inter­ac­tive, from Mind­Fit).

8. Can you walk and chew gum at the same time? try “Two in One” (Inter­ac­tive, from Mind­Fit)

9. Count the Fs in this sen­tence.

10. What do you see? can you alter­nate between 2 views?.

Mem­ory

11. Easy one…draw the face of a penny, please. Read the rest of this entry »

Bill Gates deliv­ered a very inspir­ing com­mence­ment speech in Har­vard last week. I rec­om­mend read­ing the full Remarks of Bill Gates and reflect­ing on his core mes­sage, which may be sum­ma­rized in its last sentence:

• “And I hope you will come back here to Har­vard 30 years from now and reflect on what you have done with your tal­ent and your energy. I hope you will judge your­selves not on your pro­fes­sional accom­plish­ments alone, but also on how well you have addressed the world’s deep­est inequities  on how well you treated peo­ple a world away who have noth­ing in com­mon with you but their humanity.”

A note­wor­thy aspect of the speech was the dis­play of what neu­ropsy­chol­o­gists call Exec­u­tive Func­tions, which are mostly located in our Frontal Lobes–the most recent part of our brains in evo­lu­tion­ary terms, and that enable us to learn and adapt to new envi­ron­ments. What makes a “sharp brain”. You can read more about this in our post Exec­u­tive Func­tions and MacArthur “Genius Grants”.

See here Bill Gates’ advice on how to find solu­tions in com­plex environments-and how he applies a learned pat­tern to guide his actions in the field of AIDS prevention:

• “Cut­ting through com­plex­ity to find a solu­tion runs through four pre­dictable stages: deter­mine a goal, find the highest-leverage approach, dis­cover the ideal tech­nol­ogy for that approach, and in the mean­time, make the smartest appli­ca­tion of the tech­nol­ogy that you already have whether it’s some­thing sophis­ti­cated, like a drug, or some­thing sim­pler, like a bednet.”
• “The AIDS epi­demic offers an exam­ple. The broad goal, of course, is to end the dis­ease. The highest-leverage approach is pre­ven­tion. The ideal tech­nol­ogy would be a vac­cine that gives life­time immu­nity with a sin­gle dose. So gov­ern­ments, drug com­pa­nies, and foun­da­tions fund vac­cine research. But their work is likely to take more than a decade, so in the mean­time, we have to work with what we have in hand and the best pre­ven­tion approach we have now is get­ting peo­ple to avoid risky behavior.”
• “Pur­su­ing that goal starts the four-step cycle again. This is the pat­tern. The cru­cial thing is to never stop think­ing and work­ing  and never do what we did with malaria and tuber­cu­lo­sis in the 20th cen­tury  which is to sur­ren­der to com­plex­ity and quit.”
• “The final step  after see­ing the prob­lem and find­ing an approach  is to mea­sure the impact of your work and share your suc­cesses and fail­ures so that oth­ers learn from your efforts.”

Cer­tainly, good advice for us too to refine our Brain Fit­ness efforts. Here you have a rel­e­vant frag­ment of my (AF)recent inter­view with Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg (EG):

AF: Please tell us more about what the Frontal Lobes are

EG: We researchers typ­i­cally call them the Exec­u­tive Brain. The pre­frontal cor­tex is young by evo­lu­tion­ary terms, and is the brain area crit­i­cal to adapt to new sit­u­a­tions, plan for the future, and self-regulate our actions in order to achieve long-term objec­tives. We could say that that part of the brain, right behind our fore­head, acts as the con­duc­tor of an orches­tra, direct­ing and inte­grat­ing the work of other parts of the brain.

I pro­vide a good exam­ple in The Exec­u­tive Brain book, where I explain how I was able to orga­nize my escape from Rus­sia into the US.

Sig­nif­i­cantly, the path­ways that con­nect the frontal lobes with the rest of the brain are slow to mature, reach­ing full oper­a­tional state between ages 18 and 30, or maybe even later. And, given that they are not as hard-wired as other parts of the brain, they are typ­i­cally the first areas to decline.

Well, I’d say Mr. Gates has pretty mature and solid pathways!

Here is new brain teaser from puz­zle mas­ter Wes Car­roll. He found this one in the Mensa pub­li­ca­tion Num­ber Puz­zles for Math Geniuses by Harold Gale.

The Fork in the Road

Ques­tion:
Start at the cen­ter num­ber and col­lect another four num­bers by fol­low­ing the paths shown (and not going back­wards). Add the five num­bers together. What is the low­est num­ber you can score?

This puz­zle works your exec­u­tive func­tions in your frontal lobes by using your plan­ning skills, hypoth­e­sis test­ing, and logic.

Click here to get the Answer.

I was sent these links to a free online cross­word puz­zle game and sudoko. While we often talk about the excel­lent computer-based brain fit­ness pro­grams avail­able, puz­zles can still be good men­tal exer­cise … they are just not a com­plete work­out for your whole brain.

Word games like cross­word puz­zles and SCRABBLE® exer­cise your lex­i­cal recall (mem­ory for words that name things), atten­tion, mem­ory, and pat­tern recog­ni­tion. They can help main­tain your vocab­u­lary and avoid the frus­trat­ing tip-of-the-tongue phe­nom­e­non that all of us expe­ri­ence from time to time. Sudoko is not a math­e­mat­ics game in that you don’t actu­ally manip­u­late the num­bers as math­e­mat­i­cal enti­ties, but it is a pat­tern recog­ni­tion game using sym­bols (num­bers). A very legit­i­mate rea­son to play casual games is that they can be social and fun — which is good for reduc­ing stress.

The draw­backs to puz­zles and games is that they are hard to cal­i­brate to ensure increas­ing chal­lenge, and they gen­er­ally only exer­cise a lim­ited num­ber of brain functions.

So by all means, do puz­zles if you enjoy them! But be sure to push your­self to keep find­ing harder ones that fall just short of frus­trat­ing you. Also, just as you cross train your vol­un­tary mus­cles, be sure to cross train your men­tal mus­cles by bal­anc­ing your work­out with other types of men­tal work (motor coor­di­na­tion, audi­tory, work­ing mem­ory, plan­ning, etc.). The com­put­er­ized pro­grams make it eas­ier for you in the sense that they are indi­vid­u­ally cal­i­brated for you to employ nov­elty, vari­ety, chal­lenge, and prac­tice to exer­cise your brain more thor­oughly in each session.

Fur­ther read­ing on lan­guage pro­duc­tion, com­pre­hen­sion, and goofs:

• Lan­guage Pro­duc­tion and Perception
• Wernicke's Area: an area of the brain where the tem­po­ral and pari­etal lobes meet that is used in under­stand­ing and com­pre­hend­ing spo­ken language
• Broca’s Area: an area in the frontal lobe of the brain that is involved in lan­guage pro­cess­ing, speech pro­duc­tion and comprehension
• The Lan­guage Pro­duc­tion Group at the Max Planck Insti­tute for Psycholinguistics