14 Weird Brain Exercises That Help You Get Smarter

Healthy Living

Giving your brain new experiences that combine physical senses—vision, smell, touch, taste, and hearing—with emotional “sense” stimulates more connections between different brain areas, causes nerve cells to produce natural brain nutrients that dramatically help memory, and makes surrounding cells stronger and more resistant to the effects of aging. Try these brain exercises during your morning routine or your down time and see if you feel the difference.

Brush teeth with your non-dominant hand

Research has shown that using the opposite side of your brain (as in this exercise) can result in a rapid and substantial expansion of in the parts of the cortex that control and process tactile information from the hand.

Brain exercise: Brush, and don’t forget to open the tube and apply toothpaste in reverse, too.

Here are more healthy habits proven to boost your brain health.

Shower with your eyes closed

Your hands will probably notice varied textures of your own body you don’t “see,” and will send messages back to your brain.

Brain exercise: Try using just your tactile senses (although, use common sense to avoid burn or injury). Locate the taps solely by feel, and adjust the temperature. Then wash, shave, and so on with your eyes shut.

These are the showering mistakes you didn’t know you were making.

Switch around your morning activities

Brain imaging studies show that novel tasks exercise large areas of the cortex, indicating increased levels of brain activity in several distinct areas. This activity declines when the task becomes routine and automatic.

Brain exercise: Get dressed after breakfast, walk the dog on a new route, or change your TV or news station. Even watching a kids’ program like Sesame Street, for example, may arouse the brain to notice how much of what you take for granted is explored in depth by children.

Check out these fun brain games that are guaranteed to boost your brain power.

Open the car window

The hippocampus, an area of your brain that processes memories, is especially involved in associating odours, sounds, and sights to construct mental maps.

Brain exercise: Try to identify new smells and sounds on your route. Opening the windows provides these circuits with more raw material.

Play with spare change

Because our brains regularly rely on visual cues to distinguish between objects, using touch to identify subtly different things increases activation in cortical areas that process tactile information and leads to stronger synapses. (Similarly, adults who lose their sight learn to distinguish Braille letters because their brain devotes more pathways to processing fine touch.)

Brain exercise: Place a cup full of coins in your car’s drink holder. While at a stoplight, try to determine the denominations by feel alone. You can also put coins in your pocket, and identify them when you stop at a corner.

Check out even more easy ways to get smarter.

Play “10 Things”

Forcing your brain to think of alternates to the everyday will help keep it strong.

Brain exercise: Someone hands you an ordinary object, and you must demonstrate 10 different “things” that the object might be. Example: A fly swatter might be a tennis racket, a golf club, a fan, a baton, a drumstick, a violin, a shovel, a microphone, a baseball bat, or a canoe paddle.

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