Posts by Caroline Latham

I was sent links to a free online cross­word puz­zle game and sudoko. While we often talk about the excel­lent com­put­er-based brain fit­ness pro­grams avail­able, puz­zles can still be good men­tal exer­cise … they are just not a com­plete work­out for your whole brain. Word games like cross­word puz­zles and SCRABBLE® exer­cise your lex­i­cal recall (mem­o­ry for words that name things), atten­tion, mem­o­ry, and pat­tern recog­ni­tion. They can help main­tain your vocab­u­lary and avoid the frus­trat­ing tip-of-the-tongue phe­nom­e­non that all of us expe­ri­ence from time to time. Sudoko is not a math­e­mat­ics game in that you don’t actu­al­ly manip­u­late the num­bers as math­e­mat­i­cal enti­ties, but it is a pat­tern recog­ni­tion game using sym­bols (num­bers). A very legit­i­mate rea­son to play casu­al games is that games can be social and fun — which is good for reduc­ing stress.The draw­backs to puz­zles and games is that they are hard to cal­i­brate to ensure increas­ing chal­lenge, and they gen­er­al­ly only exer­cise a lim­it­ed num­ber of brain functions.