Building Your Mental Aerobics Program

Just as physical activity can keep your body strong, mental activity can keep your mind sharp and agile. You can continue to challenge yourself by using a variety of approaches. You might consider exploring a new hobby, learning a foreign language, or perhaps taking up a musical instrument. Making a change in your leisure reading - perhaps switching from romance novels to biographies or mysteries could potentially tweak your dendrites.

Whether you were able to complete all of the exercises or only a few, you should have a sense of the difficulty level for mental aerobic exercises that suits you. As you build your skills over time, you may want to advance to a higher level to challenge yourself and keep you stimulated. Learn to fit a program into your weekly schedule, and you can readily expand your repertoire with novel puzzles, games and brain teasers from other sources, including magazines, books, and websites. The following exercises are beginning level exercises. Intermediate and advanced excercises are available from Gary Small's book, The Memory Bible, from which the following exercises have been excerpted:

Beginning Exercises

1 - Warm-up Exercise. Take a piece of paper and a pencil and try writing your first name using your non-dominant hand (i.e., left hand if you are right-handed). Now take a second pencil and try writing your first name using both hands at the same time. Now try it with your last name.

2 - Right-Brain Exercise. How many squares are there in the following figure?

3 - Right-Brain Exercise. Complete the sequence by choosing object A, B, or C:

4 - Right-Brain Exercise. Look at the object on the left and then choose the version that matches, A, B, or C.

5 - Right-Brain Exercise. Arrange five toothpicks of your own into the shape of a number five as below. Now try to rearrange them into the number sixteen.

6 - Left-Brain Exercise. The following proverb has had all of the vowels taken out, and the remaining letters broken up into groups of four or three letters each. Replace the vowels and find the proverb:

7 - Left-Brain Exercise. Starting with SOFT, change one letter at a time until you have the word LENS. Each change must be a proper word.

8 - Left-Brain Exercise. A water lily doubles its size every day in a round pond, and after 20 days, the lily will completely cover the pond. How many days will it take to cover half the pond?

9 - Left-Brain Exercise. Which is the odd one out:

10 - Left-Brain Exercise. What number ends this sequence?

11 - Left-Brain Exercise. Which letter or number is the odd one in each rectangle?

12 - Whole-Brain Exercise (both hemispheres). A woman marries 11 men in the space of 10 years. She divorces none of them, none of them die and she has not committed any crime. How is this possible?

13 - Whole-Brain Exercise. You need to get a pair of matching socks from your drawer but the room is pitch black. You know there are 10 blue socks and 10 brown socks in the drawer. How many socks do you need to remove to be sure you have a pair of matching socks?

14 - Whole-Brain Exercise. Hans is standing behind Gerrie and at the same time Gerrie is standing behind Hans.

See the next page for answers to these exercises.
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