Time for a Brain Teaser

Words are stored in the temporal lobe of your brain (in green on the cerebral cortex image  to the right). But on which brain hemisphere, right or left? Your brain has two sides (two hemispheres) connected by the corpus callosum. You have one temporal lobe on each side of the brain.

If you are right-handed, your language is stored mostly in your left temporal lobe. If you are left-handed, you are not so lateralized and your language is stored a bit on both sides of your brain, in the temporal lobes. Also, words that are often heard together (such as salt and pepper) or words that share some meaning (such as nurse and doctor) are connected or associated in the brain. Once you hear one, the other is often activated.

Here is a brain teaser whose aim is to stimulate the connections or associations between words in your temporal lobe. You will see pairs of words, and your goal is to find a third word that is connected or associated with both of these two words.

For example, the first pair is PIANO and LOCK. The answer is KEY. The word key is connected with both the word piano and the word lock: there are KEYS on a piano and you use a KEY to lock doors. Key is what is called a homograph: a word that has more than one meaning but is always spelled the same.