You may have already seen that our Teasers sec­tion con­tains not only our selec­tion of Top 50 Brain Teasers and Games, but also a reg­u­larly updated page with lat­est Games for the Brain.

Below you have the brain games and teasers we have added in 2008 so far. Ready?
– Octo­ber 2008: Top Brainy Haikus. Yours?.

- Sep­tem­ber 2008: What is going on with these pictures?.

- Sep­tem­ber 2008: 7 Brain­teasers for Job Interviews.

- August 2008: Can you use men­tal self rota­tion to read a map?.

- August 2008: Spot the Dif­fer­ences! how many are there?.

- July 2008 Read the rest of this entry »

Thank you to every­one who has writ­ten so many fun haikus over the sum­mer (fol­low­ing the post Top 25 Brain and Mind Haikus. Yours?). These are the 10 I have enjoyed the most:

(Also, Can you write a haiku describ­ing any­thing cross­ing your mind now? Remem­ber the sim­ple rules: write 3 lines, which don’t need to rhyme, con­tain­ing 5,7, and 5 syl­la­bles. You can leave your haiku as a com­ment below for extra points…)

—–
Top 10 Brainy Haikus — enjoy!

- Amit:

Love, col­lege, career.
A new world of tran­si­tions.
Will I sur­vive? Yes.

- Kathy:

My release tech­nique,
For­give, for­get, love all,
Med­i­tate on that!

- Alan:

Through the micro­scope,
slice of brain stains pink and blue,
the won­der of thought.

- Justin:

Justin the genieus
Must spell check the word genius
to post this Haiku

- Tim: Read the rest of this entry »

Today we intro­duce a  highly evolved ver­sion of brain teasers.

How quickly can you pro­vide the cor­rect answer to these 3 questions?

- 1) What is going on in these 2 pic­tures below?

- 2) what may explain it?

- 3) Is there some ele­ment out of place?

Ready. Set. Go! Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. Pas­cale Mich­e­lon recently shared with our read­ers which brain areas and cog­ni­tive func­tions are engaged as we solve the type of brain teaser known as Spot the Dif­fer­ence, where we have to find the dif­fer­ences between two ver­sions of one image: Read the rest of this entry »

Read­ers have con­tributed a good num­ber of haikus on brain-related top­ics. Below you have my  Favorite 7, and many other fun ones…which ones do you like the most?

Also, Can you write a haiku describ­ing any­thing cross­ing your mind now? Remem­ber the sim­ple rules: write 3 lines, which don’t need to rhyme, con­tain­ing 5,7, and 5 syl­la­bles. You can leave your haiku as a com­ment for extra points…

My Favorite 7 Brain and Mind Haikus

- Techne, the philoso­pher, wonders:

Solve the big ques­tions:
How do I know when I know?
Who knows the knower?

- Steve, the envi­ron­men­tal­ist, requests:

Neu­ro­plas­tic good.
Plas­tic, though lasts for­ever.
Always recycle!

Read the rest of this entry »

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 the rest of this entry »

Here you are have the bi-monthly update with our 10 most Pop­u­lar blog posts. (Also, remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive our RSS feed, or to our newslet­ter, at the top of this page, if you want to receive this digest by email).

News and Events

Exer­cise your brain in the Cog­ni­tive Age: The New York Times pub­lished two thought-provoking arti­cles on brain and cog­ni­tive fit­ness, one of them fea­tur­ing SharpBrains.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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 the rest of this entry »

Har­riet Vines, Ph.D., an expe­ri­enced author and retired col­lege pro­fes­sor, sends us a few fun brain exer­cises to train our atten­tion and work­ing mem­ory (the abil­ity to keep infor­ma­tion cur­rent for a short period while using this infor­ma­tion). Given them a try! They are not as easy as they may sound…

1. Say the days of the week back­wards, then in alpha­bet­i­cal order.

2. Say the months of the year in alpha­bet­i­cal order. Easy? well, why don’t you try doing so back­wards, in reverse alpha­bet­i­cal order.

3. Find the sum of your date of birth, mm/dd/yyyy. Want more exer­cise? Do the same with friends’ and rel­a­tives’ date of birth.

4. Name two objects for every let­ter in your com­plete name. Work up to five objects, try­ing to use dif­fer­ent items each time.

5. Wher­ever you are, look around and within two min­utes, try to find 5 red things that will fit in your pocket, and 5 blue objects that are too big to fit.

– Har­riet Vines, Ph.D. is the Author of Age Smart-How to Age Well, Stay Fit and Be Happy, where she shares results from 15 years of con­sul­ta­tion, work­shops and lec­tures at Leisure World, Canyon Ranch, Inde­pen­dent Retire­ment Com­mu­ni­ties, and Adult Edu­ca­tion Programs.

Note: if you have brain teasers, news, or arti­cles you’d like to share, please email us at info@ sharpbrains.com. Look­ing for­ward hear­ing from you!

A reader (thanks Mike!) sends us this fun arti­cle, titled A mat­ter of train­ing, on how to train our mem­ory. Some quotes:

“It’s a skill, not a tal­ent. It’s some­thing any­one could have picked up … I’m not born with this. It’s about train­ing and tech­nique, he says, explain­ing his unusual abil­ity. Anant holds the Limca Record  the Indian equiv­a­lent of the Guin­ness Record œ for mem­o­ris­ing 75 tele­phone num­bers, along with the names of their own­ers, in less than an hour. He is recog­nised as “the man with the most phe­nom­e­nal mem­ory in India.

“Unfor­tu­nately, most peo­ple think that mem­o­ris­ing is very dif­fi­cult. The moment they see some­one demon­strate some­thing like this, they think it’s out of this world.

If you want to remem­ber some­thing, you have to link it to some­thing you already know. Asso­ci­a­tion is the nat­ural prin­ci­pal. For exam­ple, if you need direc­tions to a place, a land­mark is often used as a point of ref­er­ence. And if you derive plea­sure from some­thing you do, there’s a good chance you’ll remem­ber it. Since the brain already works in this man­ner, why don’t we take con­trol of it?

“To me, an intel­li­gent per­son is some­one who is able to put together more of his skills to solve a prob­lem. Intel­li­gence is about using strategies.

The key con­cept here is that mem­ory, as well as other cog­ni­tive skills, can be trained through Read the rest of this entry »