As you may know, mem­ory relies mostly on some tem­po­ral (in green) and frontal (in red) areas of the brain. These may be the areas that will get stim­u­lated when you (assum­ing you are Amer­i­can or have lived in the US for long) try to remem­ber the miss­ing words in the Amer­i­can proverbs below.

How­ever when it comes to inter­na­tion­als proverbs below you may have to use your rea­son­ing skills more than your mem­ory skills, as it is likely that you do not know these proverbs. In this case, the frontal exer­cise is more intense. Try to guess what the final words of each inter­na­tional proverb might be. Use your log­i­cal skills.

If you live out­side the USA, your expe­ri­ence will prob­a­bly be the reverse.

US proverbs

1. The early bird gets the ___________.
2. After all is _______ and done, more is said than __________.
3. From ___________ begin­nings come great ____________. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Inter­est­ing arti­cle titled Key to fund­ing for elder­care tech­nolo­gies? Pilots, just pub­lished in CNET. A few quotes:

• “No mat­ter the size, a pilot not only serves as a means to vet whether an elder­care tech­nol­ogy will work, but it also gen­er­ates much needed data for insur­ance com­pa­nies and gov­ern­ment enti­ties to weigh whether they might be will­ing to pay for such tech­nolo­gies, accord­ing to pan­elists Tues­day at the fourth annual Health­care Unbound conference.”
• “Other pilots included a group of 35 par­tic­i­pants in 2003 with IBM and the Amer­i­can Soci­ety on Aging. The 18-month pilot exam­ined how seniors ages 65 and over used IBM’s soft­ware to change the way a Web site is viewed, such as its font size­col­ors, size of the page and other fea­tures, Gaudet said.”
• “Front Porch, a California-based orga­ni­za­tion that oper­ates a net­work of retire­ment com­mu­ni­ties, began a pilot two years ago with Dakim, using its Dakim (m)Power Cog­ni­tive Fit­ness System.”

I’d say the key goes beyond pilots: we need good qual­ity and pub­lished research to engage pol­icy mak­ers and insur­ance com­pa­nies. And a big­ger focus on pre­ven­tion and well­ness, as we saw in the post Bill Clin­ton on health care and well­ness.