International Brainteaser Month

Everyone loves a good riddle. Brain teasers are an excellent way to keep our minds sharp and focused. Many teachers have their students practice them in class, but have you done many as an adult?

People often talk about physical stimulation and keeping your body healthy, but where’s the brain gym to help keep your wits sharp? Most people don’t realize that engaging in mental stimulation is just as important as keeping your body in shape, but that’s what International Brainteaser Month hopes to change!

How to Celebrate International Brainteaser Month

A number of fun and exciting ways can be found to celebrate International Brainteaser Month! Get started by trying a few of these, or come up with some of your own:

Pick Up Some Brain Teaser Books

In honor of this event, head out to the store and look for books with brain teasers. These will be enough to keep you, your friends, and your family’s brains active and thinking throughout the night.

A brain teaser is a form of puzzle that requires thought for us to solve. It often requires thinking in unconventional ways with given constraints in mind. Sometimes it also involves lateral thinking. Logic puzzles and riddles are specific types of brain teasers.

Tease Your Brain Every Day

Take some time to prepare and plan out some mentally-stimulating challenges for each day. You could set a goal of doing a brainteaser or a complex problem every day. This shouldn’t take very long, especially if it’s just a newspaper game like Sudoku or an app on your phone. You could also consider downloading a brain-training game or app on your phone so that you can challenge yourself even on your commute to work instead of just listening to music.

Get Family and Friends Involved

International Brainteaser Month is also a lot of fun with your friends and family members. A great way to get involved with International Brainteaser Month as a group is to play a board game together that involves some strategy or problem-solving. Scrabble is one example of a fun game that stimulates the brain and helps you grow your whole night of it.

Vary Those Brain Teasers

While doing a crossword or Sudoku is a great way to activate your brain and get thinking, it’s not a good idea to develop a habit of doing the same thing. This is because it can slowly get your brain accustomed to that specific task and you’ll start looking for shortcuts in problems.

For variation, try brain teasers based around different subjects, from literature to music; our train of thought is what helps us stay focused on the tasks that we have to complete. There aren’t many better alternatives to train our line of thinking than with brain teasers!

History of International Brainteaser Month

The background of International Brainteaser Month can be followed back to the great ancient thinkers who would come up with logic questions to be solved. One of the earliest known brain teaser enthusiasts was the Greek mathematician Archimedes. He would devise and give out mathematical problems for his contemporaries as they would all learn and problem-solve together.

Some examples of mathematical brain teasers are as follows;

If three hens lay three eggs in three days, how many eggs does a hen lay in one day?

One can argue about the answers of many brain teasers; in the given example with hens, one might claim that all the eggs in the question were laid in the first day, so the answer would be three.

Mary’s father has five daughters: 1. Nana, 2. Nene, 3. Nini, 4. Nono. What is the name of the fifth daughter?

What appears once in a minute, twice in a moment, but never in a thousand years?

Those three questions are all different forms of mathematical brain teasers meant to require thinking, even though the answers are sometimes quite simple to figure out, or in some cases, are even in the teaser themselves. It’s all a matter of our thought processes.

Instead of just being a day of awareness about brain teasers, this event encourages you to do them, it’s a month-long time to build habits that can help you stay mentally active with daily tasks and challenges.

International Brainteaser Month is all about mental stimulation that helps to boost your overall brain activity and reinforce your memory power. Keeping your brain active also helps to reduce the risk of dementia and slow the rate of decline. If you’re still young and active, then mental stimulation can help you improve concentration, improve your brain processing speed and also help you tackle complex challenges by breaking them down into smaller tasks.

To achieve this, International Brainteaser Month is all about giving yourself some kind of mental stimulation or challenge that changes every day.

The idea is to stimulate your brain and get you thinking about different things, breaking down problems or challenges and finding a way to piece together a solution by yourself. By changing up the task every day of the month, you keep your brain on its toes. It’s similar to working out your body–you need to try different brain workouts every day to always challenge yourself!