3 fun brain teasers for adults to challenge your cognitive skills

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…

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Brain fitness is not about crossword puzzles and blueberries

Top 15 Insights About Neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty, Emo­tions and Life­long Learn­ing (The Huff­in­g­ton Post): “A con­se­quence of the brain’s plas­tic­i­ty is that the brain may change with every expe­ri­ence, thought and emo­tion, from which it fol­lows that you your­self have the poten­tial pow­er to change your brain with every­thing that you do, think, and feel. So brain fit­ness and…

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4 Essential (and Overlooked) Facts About Your Brain and Your Mind

An aspir­ing clar­inetist begins by get­ting a sense of the way the instrument’s sounds are pro­duced by the air she blows through it. A dri­ver must be acquaint­ed with var­i­ous vehi­cle fun­da­men­tals, such as adding gas, accel­er­at­ing, and read­ing the speedome­ter. It is no dif­fer­ent with the brain. Max­i­miz­ing your brain’s health and per­for­mance begins…

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Book review of Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined

Just a cou­ple weeks ago I had a dis­cus­sion with sev­er­al psy­chol­o­gists and neu­rol­o­gists who seemed to share the opin­ion that “brain fit­ness” is a mean­ing­less con­cept and pur­suit. On the one hand, they thought, intel­li­gence is a fixed trait and no inter­ven­tion has shown so far to reli­ably increase it. On the oth­er hand,…

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Are we intelligent about developing human intelligence?

When it comes to our under­stand­ing of human intel­li­gence, for too long, there has been a mis­match between the­o­ry and prac­tice. The­o­ret­i­cal­ly, the two main threads run­ning through def­i­n­i­tions of intel­li­gence have been (a) adap­ta­tion to the envi­ron­ment, and (b) the cog­ni­tive, affec­tive, and voli­tion­al char­ac­ter­is­tics that enable that adap­ta­tion. Prac­ti­cal­ly, IQ tests mea­sure an…

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