In which direction is the bus pictured below traveling?

Do you know the answer?

The only possible answers are “left” or “right.”

Still don’t know?

Keep reading for the answer and explanation…

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No matter what we are reading or doing, there is always the need to take a little break and challenge our minds (and to learn a bit about how our brains work). Here you have a selection of the 10 Brain Teasers that people have enjoyed most in this site.

1. Do you think you know the colors?: the Stroop Test

2. Can you count?: Basketball attention experiment

3. Planning is not that easy: Towers of Hanoi

4. Interactive visual illusion: the Muller-Lyer Illusion

5. Who is this?: A very important little guy

5. How many…: Train your Frontal and Parietal lobes

6. What’s the missing number: Pattern Recognition Brain Teaser

7. Who’s the eldest?: Reasoning Skills Brain Teaser

8. Brain Puzzle for the Whole Brain: The Blind Beggar

9. Is a circle a circle?: Visual Perception Brain Teaser

10. How is this possible?
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Happy 2007 to everyone!

We have just formulated our New Year Resolution: make 2007 the year when brain plasticity and Brain Fitness became mainstream concepts.

How do we start? well, let’s announce the launch of the Carnival of Brain Fitness (a Blog Carnival is basically the vehicle that blogs use to share posts around specific topics).

Goal: to facilitate a dialogue about this emerging field across multiple perspectives, from scientists and health professionals, to education and training ones, to basically everyone who has conducted an experiment on his on her brain and mind, and has news to report.

Context: The scientific foundations lie in neurogenesis, neuroplasticity, cognitive training and stress management. Medical and health applications range from stroke and TBI rehabilitation to ADD/ADHD and early Alzheimer’s to Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and cognitive therapy. Educational and training applications go from helping kids improve reading abilities to helping manage stress and anxiety – including work with the “mental game” in sports and high-demand activities pr professions. Each of us may also have experiences to report, where we saw first hand, no matter our age, our innate ability to refine and transform ourselves (and our brains).

Mechanics: If you’d like to contribute, Read the rest of this entry »

How many colors do you see in this image?

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Enjoy this and other great visual illusions at Cognitive Daily’s Cool visual illusions (with animations!), and an effort to explain why they occur

What do you see?        

Do you see a series of black shapes on a white background, or do you see a white word on black background?

This image is an example of an ambiguous illusion — a picture or object that requires perceptual switching between the alternative interpretations of figure and ground. Our visual system simplifies visual scenes into a foreground figure that we focus on and a ground which is everything else and forms the background. And although you may be able to switch the figure and ground back and forth to see one image or the other, your eyes will not let you see both images at the same time. Our visual perception is created by our brain’s interpretation in the cerebral cortex of visual information entering through the visual pathway.

Why do we have brains? To survive (and perpetuate our genes). Not to be right, or make sense, or be logical. Which is the whole point behind evolutionary psychology, a very fun field. Anyway, 2 pieces today made me think of this.

One, Could our big brains come from Neanderthals?, saying that “Neanderthals may have given the modern humans who replaced them a priceless gift — a gene that helped them develop superior brains, U.S. researchers reported Tuesday. And the only way they could have provided that gift would have been by interbreeding, the team at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Chicago said.”

Two, Cognitive Daily has a great post on how Motivation Affects Visual Perception, summarized with “These studies provide pretty strong evidence, then, that participants’ object perception was affected by their motivation to eat or drink something that tastes good, or at least by their motivation not eat or something that looked like it would taste really bad.”

Enjoy,

Alvaro

We are big fans of Scientific American, especially their Scientific American Mind publication.

They also publish special collections of updated articles around specific topics-over the weekend I have been enjoying one of their best ones, “Secrets of the Senses”, with a great blend of good content and fun brain teasers.

Enjoy! Read the rest of this entry »

What do you see?

Keep looking at it …

Hint:
You should be able to perceive two different images.

Brain Science:
This image is an example of an ambiguous illusion — a picture or object that requires perceptual switching between the alternative interpretations of figure and ground. And although you may be able to switch back and forth to see one image or the other, your eyes will not let you see both at the same time.

Our visual perception is created by our brain’s interpretation in the cerebral cortex of visual information entering through the visual pathway. And sometimes our minds get too involved in interpreting the perceptual input, rather than passively recording it, and make mistakes, otherwise known as “optical illusions”.

Answer:
An Indian Chief or an Eskimo
Links:
Optical illusion definition
Optical illusions primer

 

“Creativity is not just about the creation of an art object, or a piece of music, or a film, or the creation of a scientific project, but also about the creation of social relations and of cultural institutions,” says Antonio Damasio. “People rarely associate these latter areas with creativity, but anytime we produce something new, be it an architectural drawing, classroom curriculum, or a new approach to a business problem, the creative process is at work.”

According to Wikipedia, creativity “is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts.” In her book, The Creative Habit, the choreographer Twyla Tharp writes an excellent guide to fostering the habits that prepare you to be creative. As with all forms of brain exercises, it takes consistent effort, organization, and commitment. Greenman Review summarizes:

Tharp’s basic premise as this: you can’t be creative if you work without structure. This structure can take many forms. One is the structure of daily routines or rituals. Tharp starts her day, every day, at 5:30 a.m. with a cab ride to the gym where she works out for two hours. Sometimes structure involves paring away unnecessary distractions. Tharp talks about Henry David Thoreau going to live alone at Walden Pond as a way of allowing his inner voice to be heard more clearly, and mentions that she often avoids watching films while she is in the middle of a project. Often structure takes the form of a record of the steps you took to get from the beginning to the end of a project. Tharp uses heavy cardboard file boxes to hold various artifacts that relate to each of her creative projects. She labels them and stores them on industrial shelving in her work area. Other people might use file folders or notebooks or electronic files to store these records.

Nancy Andreasen is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of Iowa. Based on her research using positron-emission tomography (PET) scans of people’s brains during creative tasks, she suggests that creativity arises largely from the “association cortex”—parts of the frontal, parietal and temporal lobes that integrate sensory and other information. In her book, The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius, she lists cultural factors that have spurred creative thought in the past: intellectual freedom, open competition, a critical mass of creative people, the presence of mentors and patrons, and some degree of economic prosperity. She also suggests that to boost creativity, adults practice making close observations of a chosen item or imagining oneself to be someplace or someone else. Her recommendations for children include: less television, more music, and more outdoor activity.

Alice Flaherty from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School presents a three-factor model of idea generation and creative drive, focusing on interactions between the temporal lobes, frontal lobes, and limbic system. Temporal lobe changes, as in hypergraphia, often increase the quantity of idea generation, sometimes at the expense of quality. On the other hand, frontal lobe deficits may decrease idea generation, in part because of rigid judgments about an idea’s worth. The balance between frontal quality and temporal quantity is mediated by interconnectivity within each cortical area that mutually inhibits the other area. Dopamine in the mesolimbic pathway influences novelty seeking behavior, creative drive, and goal-directed behavior. Although creative drive and actual skill are neither the same thing nor use the same brain anatomy, creative drive does correlate better with successful creative output than actual skill does. Traditional neuroscientific models of creativity, such as the left brain – right brain hemispheric model, emphasize skills primarily, and stress art and musical skill at the expense of language and mathematics. This three-factor model proposed by Flaherty opens up to research findings in a broad range of normal and pathological states.

Further Links
Mind/Body, Emotions, and Decision-Making
Social Intelligence and Mirror Neurons
Social Intelligence and the Frontal Lobes
An Ape Can Do This. Can We Not?
“Use It or Lose It” : What is “It”?
The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind by Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg
Brain Exercise at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute