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Click Therapeutics™ Reports Preliminary Results of a 416-Participant Clinical Study Demonstrating Exceptional Engagement and Efficacy of Clickotine®, a Patent-Pending Digital Therapeutics™ Program for Smoking Cessation (press release):

“Click Therapeutics, Inc. (“Click”), a company developing a suite of personalized data-driven digital therapeutics for chronic health conditions, announces today preliminary results of its fully remote clinical trial of Clickotine, a digital program designed for smoking cessation. Read the rest of this entry »

The Power of Nothing: Could studying the placebo effect change the way we think about medicine? (The New Yorker):

“For years, Ted Kaptchuk performed acupuncture at a tiny clinic in Cambridge, a few miles from his current office, at the Harvard Medical School. He opened for business in 1976, having just returned from Asia, where he had spent four years honing his craft. Not long after he arrived in Boston, he treated an Armenian woman for chronic bronchitis. A few weeks later, the woman returned with her husband and told Kaptchuk that he had “cured” her.” Read the rest of this entry »

Neuroscientists at Columbia University Medical Center (see our previous interview with Yaakov Stern on the Cognitive Reserve) have asked for help in recruiting volunteers for an exciting clinical trial. If you are based in New York City, and between the ages of 60 and 75, please consider joining this study.

More information below:

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Use it or Lose it?

Train your Brain! Healthy adults between the ages of 60 and 75 living in NYC are invited to join a study of mental fitness training. Qualified individuals will play a scientifically-based video game in our laboratory, and will be tested to determine the effects on attention, memory, and cognitive performance.

You will earn up to $600 plus transportation costs if you complete the 3-month program.

This exciting study is being performed by the Cognitive Neuroscience Division of the Sergievsky Center at Columbia University Medical Center.

If interested, contact us today: Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a quick quiz to test your memory and thinking skills which should work out your temporal and frontal lobes. See how you do!

1. Name the one sport in which neither the spectators nor the participants know the score or the leader until the contest ends.
2. What famous North American landmark is constantly moving backward?
3. Of all vegetables, only two can live to produce on their own for several growing seasons. All other vegetables must be replanted every year. What are the only two perennial vegetables?
4. What fruit has its seeds on the outside?
5. In many liquor stores, you can buy pear brandy, with a real pear inside the bottle. The pear is whole and ripe, and the bottle is genuine; it hasn’t been cut in any way. How did the pear get inside the bottle?
6. Only three words in Standard English begin with the letters “dw” and they are all common words. Name two of them.
7. There are 14 punctuation marks in English grammar. Can you name at least half of them?
8. Name the one vegetable or fruit that is never sold frozen, canned, processed, cooked, or in any other form except fresh.
9. Name 6 or more things that you can wear on your feet beginning with the letter “S.”

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Answers To Quiz:

1.  The one sport in which neither the spectators, nor the participants, know the score or the leader until the contest ends: boxing
2.  The North American landmark constantly moving backward: Niagara Falls (the rim is worn down about two and a half feet each year because of the millions of gallons of water that rush over it every minute.)
3. Only two vegetables that can live to produce on their own for several growing seasons: asparagus and rhubarb.
4. The fruit with its seeds on the outside: strawberry.
5. How did the pear get inside the brandy bottle? It grew inside the bottle. (The bottles are placed over pear buds when they are small and are wired in place on the tree. The bottle is left in place for the entire growing season. When the pears are ripe, they are snipped off at the stems.)
6. Three English words beginning with “dw”: dwarf, dwell, and dwindle.
7. Fourteen punctuation marks in English grammar: period, comma, colon, semicolon, dash, hyphen, apostrophe, question mark, exclamation point, quotation marks, brackets, parenthesis, braces, and ellipses.
8. The only vegetable or fruit never sold frozen, canned, processed, cooked, or in any other form but fresh: lettuce.
9. Six or more things you can wear on your feet beginning with “s”: shoes, socks, sandals, sneakers, slippers, skis, skates, snowshoes, stockings, stilts.

More brain teaser games:

• Top 25 Brain Teasers, Games and Illusions
• Brain Teasers for each Cognitive Ability
• More Mind Teasers and Games for Adults of any Age

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).

Solution:
Two to one.

Explanation:
Draw the smaller square’s diagonal to see that the the smaller square’s diagonal is the diameter of the circle. Divide the larger square into two equal rectangular halves to see that the larger square’s side is also the diameter of the circle. This means that the smaller square’s diagonal equals the larger square’s side. (Or, if you prefer, simply rotate the inner square by 45 degrees.) As we’ve seen in the earlier puzzle “The Unkindest Cut Of All,” the area of the smaller square is half that of the larger, making the ratio two to one.

More brain teaser games:

• Top 25 Brain Teasers, Games and Illusions
• Brain Teasers for each Cognitive Ability
• More Mind Teasers and Games for Adults of any Age