The old cliché is that the brain is the largest muscle in the human body, and, like any other muscle, the more you use it, the better it works. This isn’t just an adage wearily espoused by the elderly; it’s now also a proven medical fact. Keeping the brain engaged, at any age, is key to staying sharp, and this is doubly true as you get older and often lose the mental stimulation of work, a social life, and engagement with the major happenings of the day.
Frequent players of board games, in contrast to rare players, showed a reduced cognitive decline and incidence of dementia.
-Verghese, et al., 2003
This, it turns out, is true of any mentally and attentionally challenging activity, whether that be board games, video games, crosswords or anything else that gets your neurons firing. If you keep mentally engaged, it will improve your brain function.
For some this could be reading or playing chess, for others video games. Here at Brain Arcade, we aim to give you a number of different ways to keep your brain sharp, flexible, and working in tip-top shape. We have a number of IQ test-style activities. The purpose of these is not to do the activities and get an “IQ score” – after all, online IQ tests are notoriously unreliable and inaccurate but, rather, to exercise your brain in the ways an IQ test would. This is an opportunity to recognise patterns and test your spatial awareness.
Another great way to keep your brain firing on all cylinders, and to improve your brain function, is to put your memory to the test. You know how before mobile phones were invented, you were able to remember everyone’s number without a problem? That’s because your memory is not a jug that can only be filled to a certain point. It’s a web of connections that can expand and grow as long as you use it. Our memory games let you flex this muscle and keep it in shape.
Of course the brain is not just a tool for academic tasks and book learning. It’s an extraordinarily complex web of connections used to interpret the physical world around us via our senses. One of the most complex of these tasks is vision and how the lenses of our eyes send information to our visual cortex to make sense of. Our visual games range from the simple, like jigsaw puzzles, to more complex visual cortex training.
And from the visual to the purely logical, the physical to pure mind. Logic and abstract thought are the highest plateau for the mind. Once you’ve mastered the basics, you can tackle ideas and concepts through your raw brainpower and reasoning. Try out our logic games and see if you have what it takes. Push your mental self to the limits to improve your brain function. If you don’t find your limits, you can never go beyond your limits – this is true in the gym, and it’s true when training your brain.
Check in on our website regularly. We’re always adding new games and new material. Everything is a work in progress.