To preserve your brain power, you need to keep your brain active. After all, your brain is a muscle. Like any other muscle, you need to exercise it regularly for it to work to the best of its ability. Take a look at these four games to train your brain. Find the one you like and have some fun while exercising your brain.
1. Crossword Puzzles
Solving crossword puzzles is a great way to boost your memory and your cognitive skills. But if you solve one too many, you’ll become good at it, and that can be bad. If you can solve a crossword puzzle in just a few minutes, then it’s obviously not challenging enough. Look for puzzles with more demanding clues, those that take you at least an hour or so to solve.
2. Sudoku Puzzles
Sudoku puzzles are probably the youngest among the best games to train your brain. Almost every newspaper nowadays publishes them in each issue. It’s good because you have to look in every direction and keep a string of numbers in your brain while you try to place them. If the newspaper Sudoku puzzles become too easy, go online. There you’ll find different variations of the game. What’s more, you will have a limited amount of time to solve each of them. You need to challenge your brain every once in a while, and this is a great way to do it.
3. Jigsaw Puzzles
Since we’ve covered other types of puzzles, we should also cover the one that started it all. Jigsaw puzzles allow you to play with colors, shapes, and patterns, thus exercising your short-term memory. Also, scientists say that each time you join two pieces together, your brain produces dopamine. This is a good hormone that boosts concentration and relieves tension. If you want to up the challenge, flip the pieces over and try to work with shapes only.
4. Memory Game
Here’s how this works: you have a short time to look at some items, usually no more than ten of them. After that, they have to remember and name all the items without looking at them. There are several different variants of this technique, but they are all good games to train your brain. To make things more fun, play it with your friends at a dinner party.
