Games, Puzzles & IQ Tests

I get a lot of question regarding games that specifically exercise the right or left side of your brain. There is a lot of research out there that pinpoints specific areas in your brain that control certain aspects of your mind or body, and in some cases these are isolated to the right or left hemispheres. For sure, you are likely to lose different aspects of cognition from a stroke/injury to one area of the frontal lobe than you would for another. However, I don’t really like to say that specific games are designed to target particular hemispheres of the brain as I believe that many higher cognitive skills require an integration of many different mental systems at once. Not to mention that the brain is plastic….

Nonetheless, there is good science to support that specialization of specific regions of brain tissue. If you’d like to learn more about some of the various mental functions ascribed to the right or left hemispheres, check out this article from CNN called “Left-Brained vs. Right-Brained“

I just came across something called “The Brain Science Podcast”. I haven’t listened to much of it yet, but I very much enjoyed the one episode I listened to, which was an interview with Norman Doidge, author of The Brain that Changes Itself. Check it out:

Episode #26: Norman Doidge
Episode 10: Neuroplasticity
Brain Science Podcast

A new study coming out of Stanford illuminates the role of stress on the brain and highlights both the danger and power of neuroplasticity. For those who’d rather not hear about the cruel treatment of lab rats, I’ll avoid discussing the details here, but the general gist of it is that a stressed brain tends to reprogram itself and reinfornce the behaviors responsible for the stress. continue reading