5 quick brain teasers to sharpen two key cognitive skills: attention and working memory

By Caroline Latham | March 31, 2017

Look­ing for some fun–and free–cognitive stim­u­la­tion over the week­end? Here you have a few quick brain teasers to chal­lenge your atten­tion and your work­ing mem­ory (work­ing mem­ory is the capac­i­ty to keep infor­ma­tion in your mind while work­ing on pro­cess­ing and inte­grat­ing it) Please give them a try…they are not as easy as they may seem :-)

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Brain teaser to challenge your frontal lobes

By Caroline Latham | January 19, 2017

Here is a fun brain teas­er from puz­zle mas­ter Wes Car­roll. Tip­ping the Scales Ques­tion: The top two scales in the image at the right are in per­fect bal­ance. How many dia­monds will be need­ed to bal­ance the bot­tom set? This puz­zle helps you work out your exec­u­tive func­tions –sup­port­ed in the frontal lobes— by using your…

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Hard brain teaser to challenge your pattern recognition

By Caroline Latham | May 20, 2016

Here’s a quick but hard brain teas­er to chal­lenge your abil­i­ty to find a pat­tern. In the table below, each row across fol­lows the same pat­tern. See if you can dis­cern the pat­tern and fill in the miss­ing num­ber in the bot­tom row. For added chal­lenge, time how long it takes you to com­plete the puz­zle. Then, pass it…

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The Hermann grid optical illusion, explained

By Caroline Latham | May 6, 2016

In this image, do you see some­thing oth­er than black and white? Does it mat­ter if you look direct­ly at one of the black blocks, vs. at one of the inter­sec­tions? While there are real­ly only black blocks and white spaces in the grid, the high con­trast black and white areas fool the eyes into per­ceiv­ing a gray…

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