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

Here are the answers from the prior blog post:

When  I asked our developers to create a Cognitive Exercise Widget that can be shared from person to person over the web, that very afternoon it was done. When I expressed surprise, “It’s only software :-)!”  they told me.

So, click to play and forward to your friends for the joy of sharing. And, as always, tell us what you think.

Happy President’s Day! Here’s the answer to the Double Puzzle.  Did you get it?

Do you know the lingo of the Founding Fathers? This language skills puzzle will put it to the test.

Unscramble the anagrams and assemble the identified letters in sequence 1 though 12.

The results will be posted here by Monday, Feb 16th at 12 noon Pacific Time, the  day our nation observes President’s Day.

No peeking until you are done!

The 15 Fruits & Vegetables from yesterday’s Splitwords puzzle are these:

beetroot – carrot – grape – kiwi – kumquat – lemon – mango – melon – mulberry – parsley – pepper – pumpkin – raspberry – rhubarb – spinach

Did you get them all?

Canadian researcher published earlier this year a study showing that people who regularly used two languages showed signs of dementia 4 years later than people who used only one language!

It looks like bilingual brains are more resistant to the effects of cognitive decline. Previous studies by the same researchers had established that bilingual people were better at paying attention and ignoring distractions. Ellen Bialystok, the lead researcher on these studies, believes that this is because bilingual people always have to decide which language to use and suppress the other. This would provide practice in focusing attention, sorting through conflicting information and ignoring distraction.

Bilingualism may delay dementia in the same way that mental activity is thought to, that is by contributing to building cognitive brain reserve. However, we don’t know yet whether the same effects would appear if you start learning a language at 50.

Read the original journal article: Neuropsychologia, Volume 45, Feb 2007, pp.459-464

More news suggesting music can help to sharpen the brain.

“Experience with music appears to help with many other things in life, potentially transferring to activities like reading or picking up nuances in tones of voices or hearing sounds in a noisy classroom better,” researcher Nina Kraus, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University”

Read the article here

Here is another study on the benefits of studying another language.

“If you have two languages in your brain, you need a way to keep them straight, otherwise you might say the wrong thing,” she said. It’s one of the things that often goes wrong with people suffering from dementia. They can no longer control their speech.The frontal lobes, which control planning and other high-level functions, are also used in language. Research has found exercising that part of the brain can help build up a “cognitive reserve,” which can stave off dementia.”

To read more from this specific article, click here