(Editor’s Note: every other Fri­day, start­ing today, we’ll pub­lish a brain teaser to exer­cise our brains a bit. Here you have one sub­mit­ted by new con­trib­u­tor Maria Lando. Enjoy!).
Archimedes made a plen­i­tude of sig­nif­i­cant sci­en­tific dis­cov­er­ies through­out his life. He designed machines capa­ble of lift­ing attack­ing ships out of the water as well as mir­ror arrays capa­ble of focus­ing sun rays and set­ting enemy ships on fire. He explained why and how bod­ies float in the water, help­ing the king ver­ify that his crown is indeed made out of pure gold. He was fas­ci­nated with infin­ity and found the way of approx­i­mat­ing the num­ber Pi as well as count­ing the num­ber of grains of sand that will fit inside the uni­verse. He died telling a Roman sol­dier that he is too busy to meet a gen­eral as he was con­tem­plat­ing yet another math­e­mat­i­cal dia­gram.  His tomb was dec­o­rated with his favorite dis­cov­ery .… What do you think it is?

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The main value of the inde­pen­dent NIH panel men­tioned in the pre­vi­ous arti­cle comes from the rec­om­men­da­tions it makes for research, indus­try and gov­ern­ment to fill the gaps in the sci­en­tific evi­dence in years to come.

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In fact, hav­ing access to objec­tive, auto­mated assess­ments to help con­sumers bet­ter mon­i­tor their cog­ni­tive health and take proac­tive, informed action is the one part of the brain fit­ness puz­zle that is badly needed.

It is esti­mated that 60% of peo­ple with Alzheimer’s Dis­ease go undi­ag­nosed. Most patients today get diag­nosed with Alzheimer’s too late and based on tools which are not sen­si­tive enough to pick up on sub­tle prob­lems in think­ing and mem­ory needed to make accu­rate diag­no­sis and dis­tin­guish among dif­fer­ent mem­ory dis­or­ders. This often results in hav­ing many indi­vid­u­als with high edu­ca­tion and intel­lect appear ‘nor­mal’ when in fact they have an Alzheimer’s-induced mem­ory and cog­ni­tive slowdown.

Note: You can keep read­ing the arti­cle To Man­age Brain Fit­ness Through Life, We Need to Put Puz­zle Pieces Together in the web­site of the Amer­i­can Soci­ety of Aging (arti­cle link opens PDF). ASA recently asked me to write a cou­ple of arti­cles on lat­est brain fit­ness and cog­ni­tive health trends for their Min­dAlert ini­tia­tive, and this is the sec­ond of the two.