Top 15 Brain Teasers and Games for Mental Exercise

Over the last 2 years we have post­ed close to 100 puz­zles, teasers, rid­dles, and every kind of form of men­tal exer­cise (includ­ing lengthy inter­views with top neuroscientists!).Which ones have proven most stim­u­lat­ing (of the puz­zles and teasers, not the inter­views)? Well, we could answer that ques­tion in a vari­ety of ways, but I’d sug­gest this met­ric: by aver­ag­ing two ranks for each of the brain teasers: the rank for the num­ber of com­ments left, and the rank for total traf­fic received. With­out fur­ther ado…here you have:

Top 15 Brain Teasers and Games for Men­tal Exercise

1. Can you count?: Bas­ket­ball atten­tion exper­i­ment (Inter­ac­tive).

2. Which way is the bus head­ing?.

3. Words in your brain: do you know where words are “stored” in your brain?.

4. Please Spot the Differences.

5. Do you think you know the col­ors?: Quick, try the Stroop Test.

6. Clin­i­cal­ly proven Stress Man­age­ment tip.

7. Rid­dle for the Whole Brain: The Blind Beggar.

8. What is going on with these pictures?.

9. Brain Teasers for the Week­end: a few chal­lenges to exer­cise your atten­tion and work­ing memory.

10. Con­sid­er Lin­da’s job prospects: rid­dle, or obvious?.

11. Count the Fs in this sen­tence.

12. Please find the miss­ing num­ber here.

13. How many… exer­cise your Frontal and Pari­etal lobes.

14. Men­tal Imagery and Spa­tial Rota­tion challenge.

15. Enjoy this Sun­day After­noon Quiz.

As a bonus, you can also try and write some Brainy Haikus. To inspire you, below you have a few haikus writ­ten by our read­ers (giv­en that nov­el­ty, vari­ety and chal­lenge are impor­tant for our brains, writ­ing haikus equals ‑for most of us who are not haiku spe­cial­ists- anoth­er form of brain teasers to exer­cise our brains).

- Amit:

Love, col­lege, career.
A new world of transitions.
Will I sur­vive? Yes.

- Kathy:

My release technique,
For­give, for­get, love all,
Med­i­tate on that!

- Alan:

Through the microscope,
slice of brain stains pink and blue,
the won­der of thought.

- Justin:

Justin the genius
Must spell check the word genius
to post this Haiku

- GTB, the skep­tic, says

Haiku’s are easy
But some­times they don’t make sense
Refrigerator

Enough?

If you want more brain teasers and games, you can always vis­it our Brain­Teasers page.