Did you manage to match the right sports with the right skills?

Here are the answers from the prior blog post:

Can you match which cognitive skills are needed for excellence in all sports? For example, in the game of horseshoes, hand-eye coordination and mental focus are critical to a successful game. How about swimming, rowing or tennis?

Find out the answers tomorrow in our blog!

The globalization of business, advances in technology, and the new knowledge economy are transforming our jobs and how we do them. Learning on the job isn’t a luxury these days; it’s absolutely necessary. And that is where your brain at work comes in.

Want to know why programing your Blackberry should be a challenge and not a punishment? Why constantly learning new things will help you learn better over time? What time of day your brain is most likely to keep new information? Why is learning on the job is beneficial for everyone?

The Dana Foundation has launched a new website - Your Brain at Work - that connects the latest research to practical suggestions for working, and living, smarter - on an off the job. Check it out.

Cognitive capabilities are important to strengthen for continued safe driving as we age. In recent years, state-sponsored research in Maryland has shown that if a driver fails a cognitive test, he is 25 percent more likely to be involved in a crash. That’s quite an statistic.

The good news is that the cognitive abilities important to driving can be prolonged and even rehabilitated even if they are in decline. The brain gets lulled by routine, which does little to stimulate new cell growth. But challenged to adjust to new locales and situations, cognitive abilities can recover.

If older drivers are healthier and more alert, they may be driving differently, to different places and have different travel patterns, such as spending more time on highways, which are the “safest types of roads for them” according to the auto insurance industry.

Here’s a reminder of the cognitive skills required for driving:

• The motor skill of driving requires co-ordination
• Analysis of the street and highway environment requires good shape perception, visuo-spatial analysis, visual and selective attention skills
• Awareness and monitoring of the traffic patterns and situations involves executive functions.

So keep up your structured cognitive cross training routine and you’ll be a safer driver.

Solution: Here’s the solution to Alphabetical Disorder teaser posted on 21 Sep. The characters that can be found only on the right are #2, #3 and #7.

What’s the Benefit of Strong Attention Skills in Daily Life? Whenever we are presented with a new set of symbols, such as when learning to navigate traffic signs for the first time or when learning a language with a unique alphabet, we use visual memory and attention skills. As humans, we are unique in how we use symbols and characters to represent our world. It is part of our innate ability to learn and create languages, for example.

In terms of attention, consider everything that is stimulating your senses as you read this sentence. Perhaps there are background noises or a conversation nearby, the aromas of food or pangs of hunger, distractions in your peripheral vision, thoughts of things to do, recent conversations or events still fresh in your mind. Paying attention is resisting distractions and focusing on the task at hand. It’s a critical skill to master during the learning and development stages of life and can be the thing that makes the difference in success in a job or career.

For more concentration exaercises of this type try the HAPPYneuron game Ancient Writing or any of the other Attention Exercises for potentially hours of attention training.

Brain Teaser of the Day: Today’s brain teaser is called Alphabetical Disorder. Your task is to compare the different writing characters from each other in the image below. Take no more than 30 seconds to find out which ones are present in the right group and not in the left group.

What’s the point? In addition to your visual memory, this exercise primarily stimulates your attention, which is the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on one aspect of the environment while ignoring other things. Further, this task will stimulate your concentration and your visual analysis of the shapes of characters. Visual scanning skills and your ability to attend to detail is put to the test.

What’s the Answer? Can you figure it out?