An always delightful way to learn more about our brains and minds is to experience so-called optical illusions and to see how we react to them.
Below you have three fun ones to tease, and probably even puzzle, you mind.
Ready, set, go!
[Read more…] about Three quick brain teaser games to test your perceptual and cognitive skills
Can brain training make better footballers? (The Guardian):
“It sounds like a game designed for toddlers – throwing and catching a ball to encourage talking – but, according to coaches at Southampton FC, brain-training technique Life Kinetik is the latest weapon in the war to stop modern life ruining the beautiful game [Read more…] about Footballers add novelty, variety and challenge to sharpen cognitive and perceptual skills
If you practice biceps curls at the gym, you will get bigger muscles that are also stronger. So far, the same seemed true for the brain. Thanks to neuroplasticity, practice triggers neuronal and synaptic growth (i.e., brain volume growth), which correlates with better performance. In this fascinating Scientific American article we learn that as the brain masters a new skill, some brain areas do get bigger but eventually shrink back to normal! The performance gain acquired through practice stays present, in spite of the shrinkage.
Studying the auditory cortex of rats, they found that the expansion of a ‘skill-specific’ brain area with training is only short lived, even when changes in ability are long lasting.
So what does change? Although newly learned perceptual skills don’t show up in a bird’s eye view of the cortex, they must have some neurobiological basis. Kilgard suggests that learning probably results from a few parsimonious tweaks at a more microscopic level, [Read more…] about The Brain Grows With Practice…and Then Shrinks Back to Normal.
