In order to live to a ripe old age without turning into the stereotypical ‘old’ person, humans need to not only do regular physical exercise, but they need to exercise their mental faculties as well.
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Brain Training Websites Help You Stay Young and SharpRead More »
Earn your geek cred at your next dinner party with these scientific salt and pepper shakers. The salt pepper (known as Sodium Chloride) includes the formula of NaCl while the pepper would have to be represented by over 100 volatile compounds so the inventors of the shakers decided to go with Pe + (Pe)r.
If the chemistry formula’s on the salt and pepper shakers don’t catch your fancy, perhaps one of these other geek salt and pepper shakers will:
Salt and Pepper Shaker in the shape of a human brain.
Shakers that look like hand grenades.
Rubik’s Cube Salt and Pepper Shaker.
Salt and Pepper Robot Shakers.
Buy now!
More info from the manufacturer
Price: $14.99
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)
Here’s another game that makes you use your brain (or is it brainwaves?) this time to navigate a maze. You wear a headset that has a headband and 2 earlobe clips. Yes it doesn’t look pretty, but it measures your theta wave activity and in turn sends wireless signals to the game.
The object is to move a ball around with fans, and platforms, while avoiding obstacles like chutes and baskets.
If this interests you, then you may be interested in the brain trainer and the Star Wars brain training game.
Buy now!
Price: $99.99
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)
H+ Magazine recently interviewed AI researcher, Bruce Katz, who believes that we as a species will ultimately want to be free of the limitations of the human brain, which by extension means uploading our memory and consciousness to a different device, a computer of some sort.
Katz describes the brain as having a kludgy design and lays out those ‘kludges’ in his book, Neuroengineering the Future. They include:
It will still be a while before we’re able to do this. Let’s face it, imperfect or not, the human skull does a pretty good job of protecting that delicate piece of meat we call a brain, and we hardly think about it.
Taking a page out of Star Wars mythology, this game/toy/trainer (take your pick) claims to help you develop your powers of concentration. The Star Wars Brain Training Game reads your brainwaves while you try to move the ball in the tube up or down.
Apparently, the headset can differentiate between alpha, beta, gamma, and delta brainwaves. Given the price tag, there’s probably some truth to this. We’d like to test it out first to find out though!
Price: $165
(Please note prices are subject to change and the listed price is correct to the best of our knowledge at the time of posting)
Neuroscience tech company Emotiv has been hyping their latest consumer product, the EPOC, over the past few months. The Emotiv EPOC is a brain-computer interface that looks like something straight out of a Sci-Fi movie.
The EPOC headset reads EEGs (Electroencephalography) to allow the wearer to (attempt) to control things; in particular games.
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Emotiv EPOC brain-computer neuroheadset – control your computer/games with your mindRead More »
‘Brain gyms’ which help members to ‘work out’ their brains are springing up all over the country. They’re essentially computer labs stocked with software that run users through mental-fitness tests and exercises.
One such example is a gym in San Francisco which charges $60/month. It’s interesting that people would find it more beneficial to go to such a place and pay a great deal more when they could get a similar (or possibly the exact same) service online or at home.
A simple search for ‘brain exercises’ yields millions of results, but within the first 10 results are different websites and references for online services, some of which are free.
More research into this contentious area has shown that our brains simply aren’t built for multitasking, yet alone performing other tasks while driving. Research done by neuroscientist Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and his colleagues shows that using part of your brain for language processing reduces activity in the spatial regions used for driving. Since driving is the less-ingrained task, then that’s going to take even more of a hit.
But the reduction in ability isn’t limited to when you talk on the phone or with someone else in the car, but other things like attending to the radio, eating or dealing with kids or pets. Ok, so the research is there; now we as a society just need to accept it, and put the correct guidelines in place.
