Did you know that doing a Sudoku a day will reduce your chances of getting Alzheimer’s? Or will doing your crosswords every day increase your verbal and give you a variety of other skills? Keeping your thinking centre healthy will do an excellent deal for your overall health and happiness. In short, doing your favourite brain teasers every day could take you to places that you won’t reach otherwise.

Connections are everything

Eighty-six billion is the approximate number of neurons an average human brain has, and 100 trillion connections those billions of neurons form with each other. To give you an idea of this number, imagine stacking up 100 rupee notes until you reach 1000 kilometres into space. Yes, that is what is going on in our heads all the time! The more you use a connection, the stronger it will become, and it is just the opposite if you do not use it. Yes, you will lose it.

Kindle

Brain teasers are all about reinforcing these connections and building new networks, and polishing the old ones. And with the internet, the base of brain-teasing is advancing with each day. You could find a particular type of brain teaser for a specific cognitive ability, and you could also get a detailed analysis of your performance free of cost! If you knew where to go and how to do it, you could master various abilities.

The abilities

Speed reading, calculating, skimming and scanning, and creative thinking are just abilities you could develop using brain teasers. You can also use it to escape from the fast-paced world that we live in. I like to do sudoku as meditation. Teasing your brain is an art, and once you get hold of a pattern, there’s so much to benefit from!

Pause

With so much to do in our day to day lives, we often lose track of time completely. This is sad because humans spend more than a third of their lives in sleep. Self-awareness is becoming a lost cause, and doing sudoku and crosswords and playing vocabulary games with your friends could help you add some value to your life.

Boring?

Do you feel like brain teasers are boring? Good news! Neuroscientists have found that being bored is critical for creative thinking to work. Being bored makes you aware. And being aware of your life is very important if you do not know where all your time goes. And do you know what else makes boredom more critical? Your smartphones! We are just surrounded by these devices that are overly stimulating to our brains. Too much stimulation is unhealthy. Boredom is a step forward. It is a form of detoxing yourself.
Enough reasons for you to wake up early and solve a Sudoku?