Brain teaser: Will you finish your thesis on time?

Imag­ine spend­ing the sum­mer pol­ish­ing your PhD the­sis in the library. Every day you take the sub­way, a train going up North to the uni­ver­si­ty. One day you real­ize that the trains going South can bring you to the beach. Noth­ing is wrong with some leisure. You cal­cu­late that if you spend half of the…

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Math brain teaser requiring no math — just perception and cognition

Greek math­e­mati­cian, physi­cist, engi­neer, inven­tor, and astronomer Archimedes made many great sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies through­out his life. He explained why and how bod­ies float in the water, designed mir­ror arrays capa­ble of focus­ing sun rays and set­ting ene­my ships on fire, found the way of approx­i­mat­ing the num­ber of grains of sand that will fit inside…

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Meta-analysis finds value in teaching the science of neuroplasticity, especially for math achievement among at-risk students

___ The ‘Brain’ in Growth Mind­set: Does Teach­ing Stu­dents Neu­ro­science Help? (Edu­ca­tion Week): “Teach­ing stu­dents the sci­ence of how their brains change over time can help them see intel­li­gence as some­thing they can devel­op, rather than innate and unchange­able, finds a new analy­sis of 10 sep­a­rate stud­ies online in the jour­nal Trends in Neu­ro­science and Education.…

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Study suggests the real deficit underlying Attention Deficit Disorders is not Attention, but Working Memory

______________________________ Many par­ents have observed that their child with ADHD stays atten­tive and engaged dur­ing ‘high inter­est’ activ­i­ties, e.g., while play­ing video games, but has con­sid­er­able prob­lems stay­ing focused on less inher­ent­ly engag­ing tasks, e.g., doing school­work. This dis­crep­an­cy in atten­tion dur­ing pre­ferred and non-pre­­ferred activ­i­ties has led some to

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Hard brain teaser to challenge your pattern recognition

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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Under new CEO, Lumosity to expand brain training platform with focus on applied skills and broader social, wellness factors

Lumosity’s Stum­ble Reveals How We Think About Think­ing (Buz­zFeed News): “The ads were per­va­sive, pop­ping up on CNN, Fox News, NPR, and Google search­es. And they were per­sua­sive: Play­ing Lumos­i­ty games would do your brain good…But these claims sound­ed a lit­tle too rosy to the Fed­er­al Trade Com­mis­sion, which 

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