The Use of Brain Games to Improve Memory
“Minds are like parachutes”, the Scottish whisky distiller Thomas Dewar once said. “They only function when open.” A healthy mind, like a healthy body, needs to be exercised regularly in order to achieve its fullest potential. This is the theory behind the use of brain games to improve memory and other mental functions. Using computer games to improve memory is the subject of another article. This article focuses on using paper based brain games to improve memory.
Verbal Brain Games to Improve Memory
One of the oldest types of brain games to improve memory is the humble crossword puzzle. Dating back to the World War I era, doing crossword puzzles regularly can help improve memory by forcing the brain to retain facts and vocabulary. The cryptic type of crossword puzzle can also improve lateral thinking skills, thus training the brain still further. Such is the ability of cryptic crossword puzzles to indicate advanced mental functions that during World War II, they were used to select cryptographers for the allied code breaking establishment at Bletchley Park in England.
Mnemonics and acrostics can also be aids to memory. For example, the phrase “Richard of York gave battle in vain” can be used as a mnemonic to help remember the colors of the visible spectrum, since the first letters are also the first letters of the colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. And if you ever forget how to spell the word “necessary”, jut take the first letters of the phrase “never eat chips, eat salad sandwiches and remain young”. You can make a game of trying to create mnemonics for your own commonly misspelled words and hard to remember lists.
Number Brain Games to Improve Memory
Sudoku first appeared in the Dell Puzzle Magazines of the 1970s under the name Number Place. From there, the craze was exported to Japan, then Great Britain and Australia, and finally back to the United States where it originated. It involves placing numbers in a grid (usually the digits 1-9 in a 9*9 grid, though smaller and larger grids are sometimes used) so that each digit is used only once in each row, each column and each subsection of the grid. Getting better at Sudoku involves learning patterns and techniques, which provides good exercise for the parts of the brain that control memory.
Logic Brain Games to Improve Memory
“The man in the green house is three inches taller than the man in the red house”. If you’ve ever struggled through a logic problem of this type, you will know just how much memory is required to keep everything straight in your head. Creating a chart of relationships based on a string of seemingly unrelated facts involves a high level of deductive reasoning. Logic problems, and indeed any of the brain games featured in this article, provide an excellent mental exercise to keep your mind sharp.
