Elizabeth Buchen, neuroscientist, science writer and advisor to Lumos Labs, explains human attention in engrossing eloquence. Visit Madam Fathom to read more about the biological basis of mind.
The world offers an awesome, indescribably magnificent profusion of sensory riches. For our meager mortal brains, however, trying to process this deluge of information is akin to taking [...]
Check out Developing Intelligence for two simple but tricky puzzles that encourage flexible thinking. Don’t feel bad if you get stuck: people with damage to the frontal lobe of their brain tend to perform better than perfectly healthy people!
The winning entry for our name-the-game contest is Kaitlyn Hillesland’s “Lost in Migration“. Her submission held on to a solid lead, winning over half the vote.
Thank-you to all for your creative submissions, and for helping us select the
new name.
The oldest child in a family tends to have a higher IQ than their siblings. While this difference is not huge (about 3 IQ points) and is not true in every case, it brings up interesting questions about what causes the difference. Is the first-born exposed to a more favorable chemical environment in utero? Or [...]
Nowadays it seems almost intuitively evident that the brain is in the head and it controls our behavior. However, it was not always this clear. A popular notion was that the heart ultimately controlled thoughts and behavior - until a brutally direct “experimental” observation was made…
Last week we asked for your help naming our new cognitive control exercise, temporarily titled “Meet the Flankers”. We received several hundred excellent suggestions, but had to narrow it down to four finalists.
Now is your opportunity to vote for the best name using the poll to the right. Before voting, make sure you’ve tried the [...]
The Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the Alzheimer’s Association have teamed up with a concise but ambitious goal, which closely resembles that of Lumosity:
“To maintain or improve the cognitive performance of all adults.”
A few hours of attention training may lead to changes in brain activity that reflect improvement in attention. Wake Forest researchers yesterday released preliminary results indicating that following a series of attention workouts, older adults (age 65-75) were better at paying attention to visual information while ignoring distracting auditory information. Further, after training, fMRI scans [...]
Guest author Elizabeth Buchen is a neuroscientist and science writer, and a member of the Lumos Labs science advisory board. Below she describes new research examining how the brain stores a spatial map of the local environment, and how this map might be updated by new information. Visit Madam Fathom to read more about the [...]
Remembering a list of items or things-to-do is a chore that comes up often in everyday life. A great approach to remember a list is called the link technique. Here’s how it works:
Let’s memorize this grocery list using the link technique:
milk
paper towels
french baguette
ketchup
dishwashing soap
Create a vivid mental image of the first item on the [...]
