#1. The Stroop Test: Great brain teaser to challenge your mental vitality and flexibility

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stroop-testReady to test your men­tal vital­i­ty and flexibility?

Quick — say aloud what col­or you see in every word, NOT the word you read.

Go from left to right, from top to down. Ready. Set. Go!

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Not easy, right? This task is called the Stroop Test, and is used in neu­ropsy­cho­log­i­cal eval­u­a­tions to mea­sure men­tal vital­i­ty and flex­i­bil­i­ty, since per­form­ing well requires strong atten­tion, inhi­bi­tion and self-reg­u­la­tion capa­bil­i­ty (also called exec­u­tive func­tions).

Next brain teas­er in Sharp­Brains’ top 25 series:

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Bill Wright` says

    try focus­ing on the last let­ter of each word to see only the actu­al color

  3. maya says

    woah that was kin­da realy hard. like at first it was eaasy but then i saw how it changed and it was hard for my brain to try and say the right col­or! it was fun though:]

  5. pavan says

    hey anoth­er way of going through eas­i­ly is just look at the col­or, and dont let your brain read the spelling at start. Then you can eas­i­ly go through this. It worked for me!!

  8. Anoop Jayaram says

    Nice & Sim­ple One! enjoyed it.

    it chal­lenges our brain’s ten­den­cy to scan through words.

  9. ardit says

    it was very easy for me.
    maybe because i was tired and my brain for­got to focus on the mean­ing of the words…
    fun­ny.. the best way is not to try hard

  10. Tammy says

    if you blur your vision its real­ly easy because you cant c the words!

  11. Constantina says

    I pro­gressed through the first two lines and then got mixed up as i went through the oth­er lines. I have to observe the instruc­tions properly.

  12. Florence says

    Read from the bot­tom and it was faster. Con­cen­tra­tion slows down when read from top to bot­tom. Great exer­cise !!! Thanks.

  13. Brenda Kane says

    I cheat­ed and took my glass off! Worked fine and fast.
    I put them back on and it was much more difficult.
    Hope I’m not one that looks but does­n’t see.
    Thanks, fun.

  14. Tom says

    If you need­ed to be lit­er­ate you prob­a­bly did­n’t under­stand the exer­cise. bet you got most of them wrong.

  15. Lauren Winters says

    I have always had my own trick when doing things like this. I just make my sight blur­ry, so all I can see is the col­or shown and not be able to read the word. [:

  16. tuaua says

    I recent­ly done the test in my neu­ropsy­cho­log­i­cal assessment.I had a stroke 2yrs ago. I moved thru test slow­ly, found it hard to focus & con­cen­trate but after I gave it a few go’s I got the hang of it .It’s ide­al for brain train­ing & stim­u­la­tion along with all oth­er brainteasers.

  19. Bob Beaver says

    A most inter­est­ing exer­cise, par­tic­u­lar­ly as one is con­scious (aware) that the brain is strug­gling against what the eyes see and what the mouth wants to say. I enjoyed the exer­cise, but then again, being an edu­cat­ed Eng­lish­man my brain always fas­ci­nates me.

  20. Khalil says

    Well it was to say sec­ond time. I used a trick, I did not see the com­plete words while say­ing, I just con­cen­trate on the col­or of last alpha­bet of the word, did not look the whole word at all, in just sec­ond attmept the result was 100%..cool
    KA