#18. Mind teaser to exercise your frontal and parietal lobes

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Let’s now exer­cise our frontal lobes (that deal with work­ing mem­o­ry and atten­tion, among oth­er things) and pari­etal lobes (visu­al interpretation). 

Quick!

1. Count the num­ber of times the num­ber “6” appears below (you may need to scroll down).

2. Then, count the total of both “3“s and “7“s, try­ing to add the total num­ber of both as you see either (this is, don’t just count all the “3“s, and then the “7“s, but both at the same time)

1234467889974674657865876576576 3576573625432657346578436578342 2732188582735827456724687343828 7672878682768723682376783768267 2647648823178346432764876774653 7436574386581483627868653873465

 

The most impor­tant thing here is not to get the right answer, but to try. This type of exer­cise has been used by the mil­i­tary to improve atten­tion for decades (now there are more advanced, com­put­er-based, tools, but this keeps being fun).

Next brain teas­er in Sharp­Brains’ top 25 series:

Reader Interactions

Comments

  2. John says

    If you nor­mal­ly read left to right, try count­ing find­ing the num­bers scan­ning right to left… it will increase the accu­ra­cy. And, scan­ning from bot­tom to top (if you nor­mal­ly read top to bot­tom) will help you not skip lines.

  3. Birgi says

    first I got 34 6es then I was count again and I got
    33 of 6es.
    I was got only
    27 of 3s and 7s at the same time.

  8. ana says

    33 6s woo hoo!

    I read the instruc­tions that we had to count the 3s and 7s indi­vid­u­al­ly but at the same time so to keep track I count­ed the 3s using num­bers and the 7s using the alpha­bet… and came out with 23 3s and 36 7s = 59 total I’m shocked !!!

  10. Susie says

    Well, if I had been a sol­dier I would have missed one of the ene­mies named “3” and would have mis­tak­en one of my own peo­ple as a “3” or a “7.” Not good in battle!

    I got 32 6’s. And I got 60 7&3’s. I tried it two dif­fer­ent ways. First I tried visu­al­ly match­ing 7’s and 3’s togeth­er to make 10’s so it would be eas­i­er to add. I found myself mark­ing 7’s with my fin­ger on the screen, though, since they were not even­ly matched. Then I tried a dif­fer­ent strat­e­gy which could tech­ni­cal­ly be cheat­ing, I sup­pose. As I came to a 3, I would name them in order such as 3–1, 3–2, 3–3, while also nam­ing the 7’s aloud as I came to them, 7–1, 7–2, …by the end I was at 3–24 and 7–36. I then men­tal­ly added 24 + 36 = 60.
    So, I did them as I went, but sep­a­rate­ly, as well.

  11. Are D says

    Nice exer­cise! But I’m a bit puz­zled at some­thing: In the text at the top of this page you say this task exer­cis­es the Frontal and Pari­etal lobe, and that the Pari­etal lobe deals with visu­al inter­pre­ta­tion. I thought the Occip­i­tal lobe was the pri­ma­ry visu­al inter­pre­ta­tion cen­tre, and that the Pari­etal lobe main­ly deals with sen­so­ry infor­ma­tion. How come this isn’t an exer­cise main­ly for the Frontal and the Occip­i­tal lobe?

  13. Willow says

    I have a closed head injury and find the exer­cis­es a bit of a men­tal work­out. Since I found your site I try and do a few exer­cis­es every day.