You can find brain teaser puzzles and exercises online, in newspapers, books and magazines. Complete a brain teaser or puzzle every morning to help wake up your mind or help you wind down at night. A Washington Post article cites a federally funded study that found regular mental exercises could help prevent mental decline just as regular physical exercise promotes good health. Try a variety of brain teasers and puzzles and choose several to return to frequently. As you get better, choose puzzles with higher difficulty levels.
Sudoku
Sudoku puzzles have grown increasingly popular, appearing in more and more newspapers, magazines and books. These puzzles require you to fill each column, row and highlighted box with numbers one to nine. Use each number only once. Only one solution exists for each Sudoku puzzle. You can find easy, medium, hard and "evil" Sudoku puzzles online at websudoku.com to solve online or print out. Most bookstores also carry a variety of Sudoku puzzle books.
Crossword Puzzles
Crossword puzzles combine trivia with critical thinking and language skills. Crossword puzzles appear daily in USA Today, The New York Times and many other newspapers. The New York Times crossword puzzles grow more difficult as the week progresses⎯the Monday paper has the easiest puzzle and Sunday's the hardest. You can also find free crossword puzzles online at crosswordsite.com or webcrosswords.com.
Riddles
BrainTeasers.org generates a new random logic puzzle or riddle each time you load the page. These brain teasers challenge you to think beyond obvious assumptions to solve deceptively simple problems. For example, brain teaser number 276 reads: "Two fathers and two sons went fishing. They caught three fish. One father said, 'that is enough, we can each have one fish.' How can this be possible?" If you can't figure out the answer, you can click "Display Answer." The above example's answer reads: "The group had only three people, including a father, his son and his son's son."
Brain Bashers Puzzles
Brainbashers.com provides a wide variety of brain teasers and puzzles of varying difficulty levels. You can solve math word problems, logic puzzles, cryptograms, language equations, crossword puzzles with numbers, PictoPuzzles and codewords puzzles. Choose easy, medium or hard puzzles. You can also print the puzzles to work on them on paper.
