BC Business
braingames_250x425.jpg
Only on BCBusiness Online: take your coffee break and troll through our list of favourite brain boosters to supercharge your mental agility.
You’ve read Vicki O’Brien’s feature “No Brainer” — now figure out for yourself how to keep yourself sharp and mentally agile. Only on BCBusiness Online: take your coffee break and troll through our list of favourite brain games to supercharge your grey matter. Games for the Brain This great little site features fun familiar games like Sudoku, as well as potential new favourites: ours is Mahjongg Solitaire. Addictive … and good for you! Provides an “IQ” score too. The Mental Fitness Center This site is all about doing regular maintenance on the brain, providing “information, motivation and inspiration” for becoming more mentally fit. The Center is less about games than providing good information about mental fitness, but does boast a section for ‘stretching your mind’. Braingle Dedicated to helping improve mental fitness everywhere through the provision of logic problems, brain teasers and mind puzzles, this site could absorb hours of your time. Try the Mentalrobics first. Neuroscience for Kids This site claims to collect brain games for kids, but if you secretly want to boost your knowledge of the nervous system or test your response time, bid your kids good night and get online. Eyetricks Some of these games are dubious in terms of training the brain (I mean, I’m delighted to know that Bejeweled is building something up rather than eating up the time I should be doing work) but man, they’re fun. Be warned: you do have to sign up, providing an email address. Sharp Brains The mission of this site is to provide science-based information about brain fitness – and it does a great job. Offering news and tips, Sharp Brains is a brainy site that makes you think. Our favourite: Mental Training for Gratitude and Altruism. Lumosity Here’s a complete mental fitness program at $9.95 a month (but you can sign up for a free trial), boasting games and exercises that are “scientifically designed to improve your memory, attention and processing speed.” Rated one of the top sites of 2007 by PC magazine. Brain: The World Inside Your Head Not particularly helpful to the brain but too weird to omit: sponsored by Pfizer, this site, apparently for kids, lets you play a game testing your knowledge about the brain, and to download a video game called Neuron Run. It also offers a “Grown-Ups” section that provides a guide teaching adults how to talk to kids about brain-related conditions. Mental fitness? Early conditioning for accepting brain drugs? You be the judge. Times Online Series: Cognitive Fitness The TimesOnline recently aired excerpts (articles and videos) from a Harvard Business Review series about ‘cognitive fitness’. Worth a look and listen. Related Stories: No Brainer Brain Busters Ensuring Mental Health