Phys­i­cal fit­ness. Cognitive/ brain fit­ness. Both require nov­elty, vari­ety and chal­lenge. Pro­fes­sor Schlomo Breznitz, a sci­en­tific and busi­ness leader in the cog­ni­tive fit­ness field, explains why, elo­quently, below. Per­haps “we want change” really means “we need change”. Enjoy!

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Why are every­day life chal­lenges not suf­fi­cient to keep our brains fit?

– By Prof. Shlomo Breznitz

Often, when describ­ing the ben­e­fits of Mind­Fit to brain health, I am asked by peo­ple in the audi­ence whether this soft­ware is really needed. After all, so they argue, life pro­vides con­tin­ues cog­ni­tive chal­lenges, which should suf­fice for ensur­ing brain fit­ness. From the moment we wake up until we go to sleep our brains have to attend to com­plex stim­uli, plan many activ­i­ties, some of them quite com­plex, and carry us through what­ever the day offers. These tasks should pro­vide suf­fi­cient “brain exer­cise” with­out the need to engage in spe­cific men­tal workout.

This line of argu­ment sounds oddly famil­iar, since it is an exact dupli­ca­tion of claims made in the recent past against the need for phys­i­cal exer­cise. One jumps into the car and from the car and per­haps even climbs a few stairs before sit­ting in the chair, which should be enough to burn the calo­ries and keep fit.

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A fun arti­cle from the BBC high­lights some of the lat­est entries to the 2.5 billion-word data­base of words in the Collins Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary, 9th edition.

We were of course biased and happy to see “brain­food” as a newly minted word. Accord­ing to Webster’s New Mil­len­nium™ Dic­tio­nary of Eng­lish, they define “brain food”:

Part of Speech: n
Def­i­n­i­tion: any food that is con­sid­ered to aid intel­li­gence, mem­ory, or cre­ativ­ity; by exten­sion, any intel­lec­tual sustenance

We’d like to add Sharp­Brains to the list of brain foods! If you need some puz­zles to pick up your men­tal metab­o­lism, see how you do on these. Or maybe delve into some sci­ence and see if that expands your men­tal waist­line a bit. Just save room for dessert!

This is a very fun link to a series of 20 timed puz­zles put together by the BBC. It should take you about 10 min­utes or less to com­plete.
The Senses Chal­lenge

You also might enjoy their Inter­ac­tive Brain which allows you to explore both the struc­ture and func­tion of your brain. The func­tions will help you learn what areas of your brain you are exer­cis­ing when you do or feel cer­tain things.

They map out for you: anger, con­scious­ness, dis­gust, hap­pi­ness, lan­guage under­stand­ing, move­ment, self aware­ness, smell, taste, touch, breath­ing, coor­di­na­tion, fight or flight, hear­ing, long-term episodic mem­ory, sad­ness, self con­trol, speech pro­duc­tion, thirst and hunger, and vision.

Enjoy!