Pascale-Michelon

Welcome Fitness mózgu: The SharpBrains Guide to Brain Fitness, now in Polish!

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It is a plea­sure to announce the pub­li­ca­tion of the Pol­ish edi­tion of The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness, by Pol­ish Sci­en­tif­ic Pub­lish­ers (PWN), and with a beau­ti­ful and pow­er­ful cov­er! [Read more…] about Wel­come Fit­ness mózgu: The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness, now in Polish!

Brain Games: Spot the Difference

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How many dif­fer­ences can you spot?

You have seen and maybe tried that exer­cise or game in the Sun­day paper many times: find 5 dif­fer­ences between the two images.

You may like it or not. You may think it is only for kids. But it is a GREAT brain exercise!

Let’s see what cog­ni­tive process­es and which brain areas are involved in this exercise:

[Read more…] about Brain Games: Spot the Difference

Bi-Weekly Update: Preventing Memory Loss and Public Policy

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Here you are have the bi-month­ly Digest of our most Pop­u­lar blog posts. (Also, remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive our blog RSS feed, or to our newslet­ter at the top of this page if you want to receive this digest by email).Crossword Puzzles Brain fitness

Brain Fit­ness News and Events

Upcom­ing Events: I will be speak­ing at five Health, Edu­ca­tion and Gam­ing events over the next cou­ple of months to intro­duce find­ings from our recent mar­ket report. Please intro­duce your­self if you attend any of these events.

Pre­vent­ing Mem­o­ry Loss-Spe­cial Issue: Con­gres­sion­al Quar­ter­ly Researcher, one of the main pub­li­ca­tions on Capi­tol Hill, pub­lished an impres­sive 24-page spe­cial issue titled Pre­vent­ing Mem­o­ry Loss. High­ly rec­om­mend­ed if you want to be on top of the lat­est research trends and their pol­i­cy implications.

[Read more…] about Bi-Week­ly Update: Pre­vent­ing Mem­o­ry Loss and Pub­lic Policy

Social Connections for Cognitive Fitness

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We human beings are social ani­mals. It seems intu­itive (even for intro­verts!) that social con­tact has ben­e­fits. Obvi­ous­ly we need oth­er peo­ple to ful­fill basic needs such mak­ing sure that our genes out­live. Maybe less obvi­ous­ly we seem to need oth­er peo­ple to main­tain pic_pascalepost.jpgade­quate lev­els of men­tal well being and motivation.

Even less obvi­ous­ly, social con­tact may help us improve our brain functions…

Men­tal fit­ness seems to depend on a large part on being con­nect­ed with oth­er peo­ple. For instance peo­ple with low social sup­port seem to be more prone to men­tal ill­ness (McGuire & Raleigh, 1986). In 2007, Glad­stone and col­leagues stud­ied 218 patients with major depres­sion and found out that low social sup­port, espe­cial­ly com­ing from the fam­i­ly, was asso­ci­at­ed with chron­ic depression.

Mere­ly imag­in­ing lone­li­ness can neg­a­tive­ly affect our behavior…

[Read more…] about Social Con­nec­tions for Cog­ni­tive Fitness

Brain Teaser: Boost your visuospatial skills

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Boost your visu­ospa­tial skills and learn about your brain
– By Dr. Pas­cale Michelon

Visu­ospa­tial skills are used every­day in many ways, rang­ing from going from one room to anoth­er in your house to solv­ing a jig­saw puz­zle and nav­i­gat­ing in a new city. Temporal lobe Frontal Lobe

One spe­cif­ic visu­ospa­tial skill has to do with mov­ing spa­tial infor­ma­tion around in your head. It is called men­tal rotation.

Let’s take an exam­ple. Can you pic­ture in your head an arrow point­ing to the right? Now, turn this arrow so it points to the left. Done?

[Read more…] about Brain Teas­er: Boost your visu­ospa­tial skills

Brain teaser game to stimulate your temporal lobes

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Do you know where words are stored in your brain?

In your tem­po­ral lobe!

As you know, the brain has two sides (two hemi­spheres) con­nect­ed by the cor­pus cal­lo­sum. So you have one tem­po­ral lobe on each side of the brain.

If you are right-hand­ed, your lan­guage is stored most­ly in your left tem­po­ral lobe. If you are left-hand­ed, you are not so lat­er­al­ized and your lan­guage is stored a bit on both sides of your brain in the tem­po­ral lobes.

Words in the brain are not stored ran­dom­ly. They seemed to be quite orga­nized. Research has shown that words that are often heard togeth­er (such as salt and pep­per) or words that share some mean­ing (such as nurse and doc­tor) are con­nect­ed or asso­ci­at­ed in the brain. Once you hear one, the oth­er is activated.

Here is a men­tal exer­cise whose aim is to stim­u­late the con­nec­tions or asso­ci­a­tions between words in your tem­po­ral lobe.

In the left col­umn you have a [Read more…] about Brain teas­er game to stim­u­late your tem­po­ral lobes