A spate of recent news cov­er­age on brain fit­ness and “brain train­ing” reflects a grow­ing inter­est in nat­ural, non-drug-based inter­ven­tions to keep our brains sharp as we age. This inter­est is very timely, given the aging pop­u­la­tion, increas­ing Alzheimer’s rates, and soar­ing health care costs that place more empha­sis than ever on pre­ven­tion and chang­ing lifestyle.

This past Tues­day, the MIT Club of North­ern Cal­i­for­nia, the Amer­i­can Soci­ety on Aging, and Smart­Sil­vers spon­sored an event on The Emerg­ing Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware Mar­ket: Build­ing Bet­ter Brains to explore the real­i­ties and myths of this grow­ing field. The panel was mod­er­ated by Zack Lynch, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of the Neu­rotech­nol­ogy Indus­try Orga­ni­za­tion, and com­posed of a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist and 3 CEOs of pro­gram devel­op­ers in the field. Before the panel, I had the chance to present an overview of the state of the Brain Fit­ness Soft­ware Mar­ket based on our upcom­ing report to be released on March 4th.

Why are we talk­ing about this field at all? Well, for one, an increas­ing num­ber of com­pa­nies are achiev­ing sig­nif­i­cant com­mer­cial suc­cess in pack­ag­ing “brain exer­cise”. An exam­ple is the line of Nin­tendo games, such as Brain Age and Brain Train­ing, that have shipped over 15 mil­lion units world­wide despite lim­ited sci­en­tific sup­port, since 2005. What is less vis­i­ble is that a num­ber of com­pa­nies and sci­en­tists are Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a fun puz­zle that a friend gave me over din­ner a few days ago …

How do you cut a cake into eight equal pieces with only three cuts?
the cake in the puz­zle is not nec­es­sar­ily the one pic­tured below

You have to use your men­tal rota­tion and men­tal imagery skills to visu­al­ize the answer for this puz­zle. In doing so, you are using your visual cor­tex in the occip­i­tal lobes, your somatosen­sory cor­tex in your pari­etal lobes, and your exec­u­tive func­tions in your frontal lobes to help cre­ate and eval­u­ate your hypotheses.

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Answer: Use two cuts to cut the cake into four equal pieces. Use your third cut to cut the four pieces in half hor­i­zon­tally (per­pen­dic­u­lar to the first two cuts).