Language in the brain is processed in the temporal lobes. These are on the sides of your brain, next to you temples.

Different areas in the temporal lobe (mostly on the left side of your brain) deal with different aspects of language. For instance, the Wernicke area is the one that allows you to understand words. The Broca area, on the other hand, is the one that allows you to produce language or articulate words.

Damage to Wernicke’s area causes Wernicke’s aphasia, a condition in which people can hear language being spoken, but cannot understand it. Damage to Broca’s area causes Broca’s aphasia, a condition in which people have trouble producing language.

Below you will find a brain exercise that targets the neurons in your language areas. Read the rest of this entry »

Vaughan writes a great post titled Psychologist wins world poker championships on Jerry Yang, a 29 year-old psychologist and social worker who just won the World Series of Poker. He says:

• “In terms of dealing with the interaction between social influence and risky financial decisions, a study by Dr. Andreas Roider found that psychologists made, on average, three times as much money as economists and physicists in an online trading game because they were less swayed by the ‘herd instinct’
• “In other words, psychologists were better at understanding how people actually behave, as opposed to how they should behave if they were choosing the most mathematically correct strategy.”

Very interesting…

He also posits that psychologists may be better at detecting other’s emotions, maybe through the tools we described in this post Improving Your Brain Tools: Reading Emotional Messages in the Face

• “Concealed emotions, microexpressions, are the fleeting expressions that people make when they are consciously or unconsciously trying to hide their true emotional response. In conscious microexpressions they may be trying to lie, while with unconscious expressions, they may not even be aware of what they are truly feeling.” 
• According to Paul Ekman, “These expressions tend to be very extreme and very fast. Eighty to 90 percent of people we tested don’t see them.”

Brain Fitness is more than we usually think…