Keep Your Brain Nimble as You Age and Brain Fitness Events

Some good links today: 1) Keep Your Brain Nim­ble as You Age MSNBC — May 13, 2007 “If using your com­put­er as a men­tal gym sounds good to you, SharpBrains.com’s Fer­nan­dez sug­gests ask­ing a few ques­tions first to deter­mine a product’s…” 2) Great blog by Stan­ford Busi­ness School’s Jack­son library, includ­ing an announce­ment of an upcom­ing lec­ture there…

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Math Brain Teaser: Concentric Shapes or The Unkindest Cut of All, Part 2 of 2

If you missed Part 1, also writ­ten by puz­zle mas­ter Wes Car­roll, you can start there and then come back here to Part 2. Con­cen­tric Shapes: The Unkind­est Cut of All, Part 2 of 2.Difficulty: HARDER Type: MATH (Spatial)Question:Imagine a square with­in a cir­cle with­in a square.The cir­cle just grazes each square at exact­ly four points.Find the ratio of the area of the larg­er square to the smaller.In this puz­zle you are work­ing out many of the same skills as in Part I: spa­tial visu­al­iza­tion (occip­i­tal lobes), mem­o­ry (tem­po­ral lobes), log­ic (frontal lobes), plan­ning (frontal lobes), and hypoth­e­sis gen­er­a­tion (frontal lobes).Click to read the Solu­tion and Explanation.

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Lifelong Learning and Brain Health Event in San Francisco on May 16

If you are in the Bay Area, we hope to see you at this event! Feel free to for­ward the invi­ta­tion below to any­one you know who may be inter­est­ed. The grow­ing move­ment for improv­ing brain health has brought many inter­est­ed pro­fes­sion­als and inter­est­ed com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers to the table. Shar­ing our infor­ma­tion, activ­i­ties, and planned…

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Math Brain Teaser: The Unkindest Cut of All, Part 1 of 2

Here is anoth­er math­e­mat­i­cal puz­zle from puz­zle mas­ter Wes Car­roll … The Unkind­est Cut Of All, Part 1 of 2.Difficulty: HARD.Type: MATH (Spatial).Question:The area of a square is equal to the square of the length of one side.So, for exam­ple, a square with side length 3 has area (3^2), or 9. What is the area of a square whose diag­o­nal is length 5?

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Brain Fitness Training for Trainers

The Osh­er Life­long Learn­ing Insti­tutes (OLLI) at San Fran­cis­co State Uni­ver­si­ty and Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, and Sharp­Brains offer this three-day work­shop for edu­ca­tors and brain fit­ness prac­ti­tion­ers seek­ing instruc­tion­al cer­ti­fi­ca­tion in the Sharp­Brains course, Exer­cis­ing Our Brains. Sharp­Brains (www.sharpbrains.com) has intro­duced the first sci­ence-based brain fit­ness cen­ter with infor­ma­tion and pro­grams to help peo­ple of all ages exer­cise their brains. They have offered the pop­u­lar Exer­cis­ing Our Brains course at SF State’s OLLI since Octo­ber 2005.

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