How focused are you? Can you multi-task? Are you a frugal shopper? How sharp is your flight or fight response? Now, you get the chance to explore your brain with twelve quick online games
From the first half-hour episode that aired last month, National Geographic’s Brain Games, the show that made science fun and offered a peek at the workings of the human brain, was an instant hit. As an extension of the programme, you can now log on to their website for twelve quick, fun quizzes that reveal how their brains work — seven of these are active as of date,u00a0an eighth quiz is slated to function from May 27, and others will be activated, subsequently.
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Answer just three or four questions and you can gauge how attentive you really are, how you perceive time and motion, whether you’re wired for fight or flight, how easily persuaded you are or how knowledgeable and whether you appreciate the difference between the female and the male brain. Be warned though: the results can be embarrassing.
Fare poorly on the Focus Pocus challenge for instance and you may find you’re as focused as, “a swarm of drunken bees.” So while this writer was glad to discover, “I’m so sharp, I’m like a human buzz saw,” “I’ve got a PHD in like everything,” and, “Every second counts, I count every second,” she also had to accept, “I’m such a sucker, a baby just took my candy.”
Scroll down on the homepage for each quiz for loads of telling facts on each cerebral subject. For instance, below the quiz that shows you how vulnerable you are to persuasion, you’ll learn not just about how banners, packaging and advertising influence what you shop for or how to recognise when persuasiveness infringes on your free will, but you can also pick up handy tricks on how to boost your own powers of persuasion. Having learnt from the notes below the Battle of the Sexes quiz that men are hard-wired to enjoy challenges and that “the hypothalamus, the region of the brain involved in mating behaviour is about 2.2 times larger in a man than it is in a woman,” here’s a fact that ought to jump out at male readers (or have them jump for joy): there’s also information on what kind of pick-up lines work best for you.