Brain teaser game to stimulate your temporal lobes

Do you know where words are stored in your brain?

In your tem­po­ral lobe!

As you know, the brain has two sides (two hemi­spheres) con­nect­ed by the cor­pus cal­lo­sum. So you have one tem­po­ral lobe on each side of the brain.

If you are right-hand­ed, your lan­guage is stored most­ly in your left tem­po­ral lobe. If you are left-hand­ed, you are not so lat­er­al­ized and your lan­guage is stored a bit on both sides of your brain in the tem­po­ral lobes.

Words in the brain are not stored ran­dom­ly. They seemed to be quite orga­nized. Research has shown that words that are often heard togeth­er (such as salt and pep­per) or words that share some mean­ing (such as nurse and doc­tor) are con­nect­ed or asso­ci­at­ed in the brain. Once you hear one, the oth­er is activated.

Here is a men­tal exer­cise whose aim is to stim­u­late the con­nec­tions or asso­ci­a­tions between words in your tem­po­ral lobe.

In the left col­umn you have a pair of words. Your goal is to find a third word that is con­nect­ed or asso­ci­at­ed with both of these two words.

The first pair is PIANO and LOCK. The answer is KEY. The word key is con­nect­ed with both the word piano and the word lock: there are KEYS on a piano and you use a KEY to lock doors.

Key is what is called a homo­graph: a word that has more than one mean­ing but is always spelled the same.

Ready to stim­u­late con­nec­tions in your tem­po­ral lobe(s)? Enjoy!

(Solu­tions are below. Please don’t check them until you have tried to solve all the pairs!)

1. LOCK — PIANO

2. SHIP — CARD

3. TREE — CAR

4. SCHOOL — EYE

5. PILLOW — COURT

6. RIVER — MONEY

7. BED — PAPER

8. ARMY — WATER

9. TENNIS — NOISE

10. EGYPTIAN — MOTHER

11. SMOKER — PLUMBER

Pascale Michelon— This arti­cle was writ­ten by Pas­cale Mich­e­lon, Ph. D., for SharpBrains.com. Dr. Mich­e­lon has a Ph.D. in Cog­ni­tive Psy­chol­o­gy and has worked as a Research Sci­en­tist at Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty in Saint Louis, in the Psy­chol­o­gy Depart­ment. She con­duct­ed sev­er­al research projects to under­stand how the brain makes use of visu­al infor­ma­tion and mem­o­rizes facts.

.

SOLUTIONS

1. LOCK —  PIANO > KEY

2. SHIP — CARD > Deck

3. TREE — CAR > Trunk

4. SCHOOL —  EYE > Pupil (Exam and Pri­vate are also possible)

5. PILLOW —  COURT  > Case

6. RIVER — MONEY > Bank (Flow is also possible)

7. BED — PAPER > Sheet

8. ARMY — WATER > Tank

9. TENNIS — NOISE > Racket

10. EGYPTIAN — MOTHER > Mummy

11. SMOKER — PLUMBER > Pipe

 

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80 Comments

  1. Mary on February 27, 2008 at 11:07

    I was amazed. After sev­er­al neg­a­tive, dis­ap­point­ing tries, I was final­ly able to get the last 5 cor­rect. I had to nudge my brain and get into the swing of it, I guess. At 62, things are a bit hard­er than they used to be!



  2. Carla on February 27, 2008 at 6:12

    I got FISH for num­ber 4. It’s fun to see the dif­fer­ent answers peo­ple get. I love it!



  3. matt on February 28, 2008 at 5:36

    8 guns
    11 crack .. lol



  4. Christian Avecillas on February 29, 2008 at 11:28

    I have very dif­fer­ent answers. For 5. I have sleep can you fig­ure out why? For 6. I have flat, paper and beds are flat. For 8. I have screams ten­nis play­ers scream when they hit the ball and one com­po­nent of noise are screams ‚and for 11 I got stink (odor), a smok­er always stinks and a plumber stinks when he works with pipes (you know what kind of pipes)



  5. NaomiBogen on February 29, 2008 at 2:19

    Maybe I belong to too many vol­un­teer orga­ni­za­tions but I got phone for tree and car. phone tree and car phone



  6. Alvaro on March 1, 2008 at 9:41

    Mary: great job!

    Nao­mi: indeed! but that’s good…

    Pas­cale: con­grat­u­la­tions on hav­ing pre­pared this very engag­ing and fun exercise!



  7. joseph on March 2, 2008 at 2:25

    For 3 all i could come up with was Tire like a tire swing lol. 

    also if you want­ed for # 9 you can change it to Ten­nis — Fire > Match.



  8. donne on March 4, 2008 at 12:06

    army is a branch of military..and branch is a trib­u­tary stream!



  9. Tony on March 6, 2008 at 8:01

    because it is fun to see what oth­er answers are out there…I came up with “spark” for 11.



  10. Socorro on March 8, 2008 at 5:39

    I came up with Queen and King for num­ber 5. like in Roy­al Court



  11. darren on March 8, 2008 at 7:50

    #7 bed of/paper roses

    Not nec­es­sar­i­ly a homo­graph but nei­ther is sheet — fab­ric or paper, it’s still the same meaning.



  12. Raquelle on March 12, 2008 at 3:11

    I’m the orga­niz­er for a Brain Fit­ness group at my office. It’s a dai­ly ses­sion that lasts an hour. I’ve used many of this site’s dif­fer­ent games and teasers but out of all we’ve played the most request­ed is the Word Asso­ci­a­tion game above. I have spent sev­er­al hours search­ing for word asso­ci­a­tion games like the one above and haven’t come up with any­thing. Could you please pro­vide some web­sites or books that i can refer to for this type of game? It would be most appre­ci­at­ed. Thanks!



  13. Alvaro on March 12, 2008 at 3:26

    Hel­lo Raque­lle, great to hear you are doing that.

    We offer work­shops, webi­na­rs and ser­vices for com­pa­nies; why don’t you email us at infor­ma­tion at sharp­brains dot com? Just put your name in the Sub­ject Line and we’ll rec­og­nize it (as long as we remem­ber it…)



  14. cellie on March 13, 2008 at 11:32

    I got “pad” for bed and paper..



  15. Matt on March 17, 2008 at 8:21

    #

    Was real­ly stumped by this lit­tle quiz, and amazed at my my inabil­i­ty to answer a sin­gle one cor­rect­ly. I only spent a few min­utes and when a word was­n’t “right there” to pop up I moved on. I then start­ed over and put more thought into it, and only then was I able to force a few choic­es. Again, none that matched the pro­vid­ed answers. Is this bekause I don’t think in this man­ner, or some­thing else? I’m real­ly tak­en aback by this result. I’m right-hand­ed by the way! ;-)
    #
    # Alvaro



  16. Bradley on March 17, 2008 at 8:24

    Wow, hard quiz?i can’t answer a sin­gle one.… :( i don’t real­ly get it either.



  17. sandie on March 18, 2008 at 4:10

    Dont wor­ry Bradley,i will give com­pa­ny for you. me too dint get a answer for a single.…cheers



  18. heather on March 19, 2008 at 1:54

    Good work!!
    I cant guess a sin­gle answer,i think my brain is sleeping,if it is awak­en it can find all the answer.lol



  19. RJ on March 20, 2008 at 12:26

    how about brigade for Army — Water



  20. sabadash on March 20, 2008 at 3:14

    Fun game!

    Reg­u­lar feature?

    -”
    dash



  21. Donald on March 30, 2008 at 4:06

    How about “draft” for num­ber 2, or am I giv­ing away my age to men­tion draftcard?



  22. Jeremiah on March 31, 2008 at 1:36

    I got “Fam­i­ly” for 3…Family Tree and Fam­i­ly Car. I guess I’ve been a dad too long :-)



  23. Larry on March 31, 2008 at 3:33

    If find­ing the homo­graph stim­u­lates the brain, would­n’t cre­at­ing a pair and the answer do so even more so?
    For example:
    1. Con­gress­men — notebook
    2. uni­ver­sal — bar



  24. Jane B on April 11, 2008 at 6:45

    I did okay, but know this type of puz­zle and so took think­ing time. For those who did­n’t get any (and I know I’m late), it will take time to get used to this. It’s ‘anoth­er way’ of thinking.

    For teach­ers (any sub­ject, but I was Eng­lish), such lessons as this are very use­ful and so much fun that the stu­dents don’t seem to real­ize they are help­ing themselves.

    I am wait­ing for the French Open (in June, I think… long wait) and chose ‘slam’ for ten­nis and noise. Sigh!



  25. Alvaro on April 11, 2008 at 4:52

    Lar­ry: you’re right. We’ll incor­po­rate that the next time we pub­lish a sim­i­lar teaser.

    Jane: great point. It’s anoth­er way of thinking…and pre­cise­ly that nov­el­ty and chal­lenge, slight­ly beyond our com­fort lev­el, is what makes great brain exercise.

    We often say that it is com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent to do the first cross­word puz­zle than the mil­lionth one. The mar­gin­al “brain exer­cise” val­ue of the lat­ter is pret­ty lim­it­ed, where­as the for­mer was excellent.

    This teas­er bring that point home…for those who did­n’t get answers-please remem­ber that the main ben­e­fit comes from trying.



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SHARPBRAINS es un think-tank y consultoría independiente proporcionando servicios para la neurociencia aplicada, salud, liderazgo e innovación.

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