Keeping your mind sharp is as important as keeping your body fit. An agile mind can come naturally from reading and from engaging in intellectual conversations or humor, but there are also exercises and games you can play to keep your mind in top form. Experts also say exercising your brain might even ward off dementia and Alzheimer’s in old age. A 2007 study of 3,000 volunteers found that short mental workouts testing memory, pattern-seeking, and visual concentration improved the performance of volunteers on such tasks, and that these improvements are detectable as much as five years later. The theory is that if you keep your brain healthy with a high “cognitive reserve” and enter old age with the strongest brain possible, dementia could be kept at bay longer than someone whose brain is less agile. Other theories hypothesize that exercise keeps brain cells healthy and less prone to disease.
Sudoku Puzzles
Sudoku is a Japanese numbers game featured in many daily newspapers. Its appeal lies in its simplicity, but in addition to being an entertaining and satisfying game sudoku also teaches patience, improves your memory, logic, and analytical skills. By strengthening your capacity to solve these problems, you are also strengthening the neural circuitry that you use to solve everyday problems, making your brain healthy in the same way going for a run keeps your lungs strong through regular testing and use.
Chess
Playing chess is one of the most ancient forms of developing strategic thinking powers. The different rules each piece has for how it moves forward makes this game highly complex, requiring players to need to process many different options and permutations of what his options are at each turn. Military strategy in miniature, chess can be learned by young children, who can play for a lifetime of fun and mental workouts.
Crossword Puzzles
Crossword puzzles require knowledge of popular culture as well as a strong vocabulary. If you aren’t familiar with things like movie titles and characters, historical battles and figures, and geography, playing crossword puzzles can inspire you to learn.
