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In the image above, cour­tesy of Heathrow Express. you can see 27 trains on the tracks.

Quick — can you spot the  out­lier?

(Not nec­es­sar­i­ly “wrong”, just dif­fer­ent from all oth­er trains) Read the rest of this entry »

First of all, what is cog­ni­tion? Cog­ni­tion has to do with how we under­stand the world and act in it. Cog­ni­tive skills are the brain-based func­tions that we need to car­ry out any task from the sim­plest to the most com­plex. For exam­ple, answer­ing the tele­phone involves per­cep­tion (hear­ing the ring tone), deci­sion tak­ing (answer­ing or not), motor skill (lift­ing the receiv­er), lan­guage skills (talk­ing and under­stand­ing lan­guage), social skills (inter­pret­ing tone of voice and inter­act­ing prop­er­ly with anoth­er human being).

Here are three fun brain teasers to help you chal­lenge your cog­ni­tive skills over the week­end, com­ing from our col­lec­tion of brain teasers & games for adults of all ages. Enjoy!

• Can you iden­tify Apple’s logo?
• Which way is the bus head­ing?
• Proverbs to exer­cise your mem­ory and rea­son­ing

Just came across this very stim­u­lat­ing and fun Trav­el­er IQ inter­ac­tive game…enjoy!

Link: Trav­el­er IQ Chal­lenge

Note: at the bot­tom of the page you can select a vari­ety of chal­lenges (flags of the world, UNESCO sites, North Amer­i­ca…) My favourite: Pho­tos of the World.

Anoth­er great week full of inter­est­ing and rel­e­vant arti­cles. We will start a new tra­di­tion: we will end up the week (either on Fri­day or dur­ing the week­end) with a round-up of the arti­cles we haven’t been able to com­ment on dur­ing the week. Please feel free to send us your sug­ges­tions too!

(You can join our month­ly newslet­ter by sub­scrib­ing at the top of this page).

Brave Heart: does will pow­er reside in heart?

• “A recent study has looked into the issue of whether cog­ni­tive self -reg­u­la­tion (will pow­er / moti­va­tion) is also asso­ci­at­ed with HRV. The study report­ed that high­er base­line HRV was asso­ci­at­ed with more will-pow­er and abil­i­ty to resist temp­ta­tion.”

Book review: Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain by Sharon Beg­ley

• “Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain is as enter­tain­ing as it is edi­fy­ing. This unlike­ly page turn­er fas­ci­nates, and sug­gests opti­mism about your brain’s capac­i­ties.
  Con­sid­er­ing the aging baby boom gen­er­a­tion and the demands this group has cre­at­ed in every phase of life, if a cul­ture of men­tal fit­ness devel­ops, it won’t sur­prise me. Being a boomer myself, I’m all for it. I just hope I don’t have to become a bod­hisatt­va to reap the ben­e­fits.”

Newsweek: Clear link between exer­cise and improved cog­ni­tion

• “Last week, in a land­mark paper, researchers announced that Read the rest of this entry »

The Cana­di­an Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion just con­tact­ed us to alert us of what looks like a fun con­cept: they are doing a major PR push to dri­ve as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble to do an online IQ test in their site, and they will com­pare aver­ages accross cities, pro­fes­sions Tat­too Artists, Mil­lion­aires, Fit­ness Instruc­tors, Sur­geons, May­ors, Talk Jocks and Celebri­ties)…

The test will be post­ed online on March 18 at 3pm EST and broad­cast to Cana­da at 8pm.

You can learn more here.