tony-robbins

Lifelong Learning: Changing My Brain

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Hi!Andreas Engvig
This is Andreas, the Nor­we­gian MD/PhD in neu­ro­science can­di­date who worked as an intern at Sharp­Brains a few months ago. Now I’m back in chilly Oslo where I’ve just begun my PhD pro­gram on cog­ni­tive train­ing for patients with mem­o­ry problems.

Today I felt it was time to reflect upon my 3 month stay in San Fran­cis­co ear­li­er this year. It all start­ed when in April when the Nor­we­gian school of entre­pre­neur­ship said: You’ve got a tick­et to San Fran­cis­co, now you got to find the per­fect start-up com­pa­ny to work for.

Being inter­est­ed in brain train­ing, I googled Brain fit­ness San Fran­cis­co and guess what I found? I got in touch with Alvaro Fer­nan­dez, the co-founder of SharpBrains.com and two months lat­er I start­ed work­ing with him and his team.

As a sci­en­tist, being placed in an excit­ing start-up com­pa­ny in a nov­el mar­ket like brain fit­ness was a huge learn­ing expe­ri­ence that gave me hands-on knowl­edge of busi­ness and entre­pre­neur­ial cul­ture. Being a neu­ro­science stu­dent, I know that learn­ing phys­i­cal­ly changes my brain, strength­en­ing it.

Here’s a list of some of the key things I’ve learned:

1) First of all, one of key rules for brain fit­ness is learn­ing. In Sharp­Brains I imme­di­ate­ly got to expe­ri­ence what a great learn­ing cul­ture can be all about  from key insights in entre­pre­neur­ship to how to make cre­ative videos and writ­ing for the web. The urge for con­stant learn­ing is both fun and stim­u­lat­ing  and I appre­ci­ate Alvaro’s sug­ges­tion to write this post.
[Read more…] about Life­long Learn­ing: Chang­ing My Brain

#14 Brain Teaser: Party For Polyglots

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We are delight­ed to intro­duce you to Wes Car­roll who has gra­cious­ly cre­at­ed a few new puz­zles to bend all those sharp brains out there! Wes Carroll

Wes is the head of Do The Math pri­vate tutor­ing ser­vices, Puz­zle Mas­ter for the Ask A Sci­en­tist lec­ture series, and an inter­na­tion­al­ly tour­ing per­former and teacher of music. With no fur­ther ado, the first puzzle!

Par­ty For Polyglots

Dif­fi­cul­ty: MEDIUM
Type: LOGIC

QUESTION:
Of the 100 peo­ple at a recent par­ty, 90 spoke Span­ish, 80 spoke Ital­ian, and 75 spoke Man­darin. At least how many spoke all three languages?

Have you solved it yet? If you are work­ing the prob­lem, mak­ing hypothe­ses, test­ing your ideas, and com­ing up with a solu­tion, you are using your frontal lobes. This is great exer­cise because the frontal lobes fol­low the “last hired, first fired” adage. They are they last areas of your brain to devel­op and the first to suf­fer the rav­ages of time and stress. So, keep exer­cis­ing them!

ANSWER:
45

EXPLANATION:
10 could not speak Span­ish, 20 could not speak Ital­ian, and 25 could not speak Man­darin. So there could have been 10 peo­ple who spoke none of those languages.

How­ev­er, that would max­i­mize the num­ber of peo­ple who could speak all three, and the prob­lem asks at least how many speak all three. There­fore, we must assume that these 10, 20, and 25 peo­ple are all sep­a­rate peo­ple. Hav­ing iden­ti­fied 55 each of whom is miss­ing one lan­guage, the remain­ing 45 speak all three.

Next brain teas­er in Sharp­Brains’ top 25 series:

Nutritional Supplements and Brain Fitness

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Well, the idea that you can just pop a pill to improve your mem­o­ry and atten­tion lost some ground today.

The Asso­ci­at­ed Press released an arti­cle on DHEA, a steroid pre­cur­sor to testos­terone and estro­gen used to improve ath­let­ic per­for­mance, increase sex dri­ve, and reduce fat as well as fight dia­betes and heart dis­ease. The con­clu­sion of a two-year study at the Mayo Clin­ic in Min­neso­ta and Uni­ver­si­ty of Pad­ua in Italy was that it did not improve strength, phys­i­cal per­for­mance, or oth­er mea­sures of health. The pos­i­tive news was: [Read more…] about Nutri­tion­al Sup­ple­ments and Brain Fitness