Fun ways to work out your brain!

With New Years resolutions being to get into shape, don't forget to work-out your brain! It’s important to challenge, stimulate and effectively exercise all five areas to stay mentally sharp as our brains age. Here are 5 fun daily brain exercises that can help you do this.

Memory
Memory plays a crucial role in all cognitive activities, including reading, reasoning and mental calculation. To maintain a good memory, you need to train for it, which can be easier than you think.
Fun ways to boost your memory...
- Listen to music! Choose a song you don’t know and memorizing the lyrics
- Shower or get dressed in the dark
- Use your opposite hand to brush your teeth

Attention
Good attention enables you to maintain concentration despite noise and distractions and to focus on several activities at once.
Fun ways to boost your attention...
- Change your route to work
- Reorganize your desk
- Combining activities like listening to an audio book while jogging
- Do math in your head while driving

Language
Language activities will challenge our ability to recognize, remember and understand words.
Fun ways to boost your language...
- If you usually read the sports section, try reading a few in-depth business articles
- When you stumble across a word you don't know, look it up in the dictionary

Visual-Spatial
Analyzing visual information is necessary to be able to act within your environment.
Fun ways to boost your visiual-spatial...
- Walk into a room and pick out five items and their locations. When you exit the room, try to recall all five items and where they were located. Too easy? Wait two hours and try to remember those items and their locations.

Executive Function
Without even realizing it, you use your logic and reasoning skills on a daily basis to make decisions, build up hypotheses and consider the possible consequences of your actions.
Fun ways to boost your executive functioning...
- Play a video game
- Engage in a brief serious conversation with a friend
- Give advice to a friend about something
- Figure out new ways to do your work

Found on askmen.com