According to the National Institutes of Health, practicing mental exercises during the senior years can improve brain health and help maintain thinking skills that are needed as our brains get older. These activities are just important in the golden years as taking care of the body is, and many of them are easy to do in your spare time.
Reading
According to the Mayo Clinic, reading can help decrease the chances of cognitive impairment by 30 to 50 percent.
Whether it's a novel or the daily newspaper, reading exercises the brain by making it perform several processes at once--interpreting letters and words and processing overall concepts and ideas.
Game of Memory
According to a study published in the "Journal of the American Medical Association" (JAMA), memory games are among the brain exercises most likely to maintain healthy cognitive function in seniors.
The classic game of "Memory" is a classic memory activity. In this game, cards with pictures of ordinary objects are laid face-down on a table. Two cards of each picture are in the stack. Participants then take turns turning over the cards to try and match up the pictures.
Sudoku
In the same JAMA study, participants who did logic and reasoning activities were shown to have a 74 percent improvement in mental function over the course of the study.
Sudoku is an extremely popular number placement game that requires the brain to use logic in order to solve a puzzle. In this game, the player is given a nine-by-nine grid divided up into nine three-by-three grids. A few numbers are placed throughout the grid, with the object being to figure out how to place numbers so that each grid, column and row contains the numbers 1 through 9 only once.
