As children, we were told that eating walnuts and almonds helped sharpen your memory. Well, no one educated us about the pool of brain exercises that were capable of performing the exact job. In the recent past, I started having issues with remembering little details. Of course, this worried me and I started researching ways to improve the condition. I came across several options that included playing online games that helped to strengthen the memory. The Spectrum Double Play subscription enabled me to play these games without any interruptions. I would play those rather addictive games for two to three hours at a stretch. And let me tell you that it did help!
Hence, here is a list of the best ones for you:
Brush Teeth with Your Non-Dominant Hand
Research shows that bringing the opposite side of your brain to use has an effect on the parts of the cortex. These parts of the cortex (that expand as a result of this exercise) control as well as process the tactile information that reaches them from the hand. All you have to do is reverse your tooth brushing actions meaning:
- Open the toothpaste tube and apply toothpaste with the opposite hand than usual
- Brush your teeth with the non-dominant hand
Keep Your Eyes Shut
Practice taking a shower with your eyes shut. This means that you will have to apply shower gel, adjust the temperature or even shave your body with your eyes shut. By doing so, you will bring your tactile sense to use. Your hands will touch the body parts you cannot see and send back a message to your brain.
Meditate
A very old brain exercise but one that has been under-estimated until recently is mindfulness meditation. According to researches, it can help you to engage new neural pathways (that might be asleep otherwise). This, in turn, improves your self-observational skills and increases your mental flexibility. Apart from this, meditation can help you improve the following areas:
- Attention
- Empathy
- Focus
- Immunity
Acquire a New Skill
This is a way of putting your brain through a challenge. Learning to speak a new language or play a new instrument puts your brain through a complex challenge. This exercise will help improve your memory. According to researches, individuals who learned a new skill did better in the memory tests than individuals who did not. The key is to challenge your brain.
4 Details Exercise
Here, try this drill:
- If you come across a person, notice four details about him/her
- Try to recall those details later
According to researches, this exercise puts the brain through passive memory training. You are just training your mind to remember things you saw. This helps to strengthen your brain and improve your memory.
If I start listing all the brain exercises, I can end up writing a novella. There are just so many of them. And, there are not only exercises but online games as well that help to fasten the brain activity.
Sudoku
This highly addictive game relies on an individual’s memory. To fill in the Sudoku puzzle you have followed a trail of consequences. Hence, you have to plan accordingly. This planning helps you to improve your concentration level and short-term memory. There are various levels of difficulty in Sudoku. You can play it both on paper or online. The online version is more popular among today’s generation.
Crossword
Crosswords are a classic way of training your brain as they test your memory apart from your knowledge of words. You can find them both online and offline. There are numerous crossword books readily available in the bookstores. It is always fun to hunt for words in a crossword. The sense of accomplishment that you get from finding out almost all the words hidden between the pool of alphabets has no match. So, it is the best game for not only for your memory but also for your knowledge.
Colored Lines
This game asks of the players to align five balls of the same color that later disappear. The purpose of the game is to ask the player to align five similarly colored balls in a line (vertically, horizontally or diagonally).
Rotate
This game helps you to improve your spatial reasoning skills. You see an object or a personality in the form of puzzles that you have to rotate in order to join the pieces in the manner that makes sense.
Mastermind
This online game helps you to strengthen your memory. You see a couple of pictures on your screen that you need to memorize. The system replaces one of the images once you click continue. Your brain has to recognize the image that was replaced. So this game will also help in the development of a perceptive & a mind with clear imagination.
Like brain exercises, these online games helped me a lot to improve my brain activity. Apart from this, you can also subscribe to packages like Xfinity Double Play that allows users to subscribe to health and fitness channels. This can serve as an alternative to the online or the other brain exercises.
Good luck