Living
Tease Your Brain: 11 Puzzles To Sharpen The Mind
Slide Nr 1Switch off any distractions, focus for a while, study the problem at hand, look for patterns, try shifting perspectives if you’re stuck …but whatever you do, don’t give up trying. Here’s a selection of physical puzzles and mind-challenging reads that’ll provide hours of entertainment, boost mental fitness and keep your brain agile in an era of smartphones and video games.
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Tease Your Brain: 11 Puzzles To Sharpen The Mind.
Slide Nr 2Sudoku – Translated as “Single Number” and popularised in the mid-’80s by Japanese puzzle company Nikoli, this paper– and peg-based puzzle requires you to fill in the missing numbers in all blank squares in a grid, ensuring that all digits from 1 to 9 appear only once in any row, column and in each of the nine sub-grids that make up the larger 9×9 grid. Sounds simple, right? Not quite, because you’ll need to think ahead logically before every move. With regular practice, you’ll stimulate the mind and notice improvements in memory, focus and mood. Seeking a superior challenge? Try Killer Sudoku, Kaodoku, Hyper Sudoku and Twin Sudoku.
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Tease Your Brain: 11 Puzzles To Sharpen The Mind.
Slide Nr 4Hanayama Cast Puzzle Series – Can you get two freely twistable nuts off a double-headed bolt? How about disjoining three swirled interlocked pieces and refitting them again? These die-cast zinc alloy puzzles may appear unsolvable at first, but we’ll let you in on a secret: you’ll need some pretty clever thinking to disentangle them. Compared to their wire puzzle counterparts, they offer a whole new level of mental stimulation, challenge and excitement, plus they make great collectables. Note that there are no accompanying solutions – you’ve got to keep trying to experience true solver bliss. No brute force or internet research allowed.
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Living
Tease Your Brain: 11 Puzzles To Sharpen The Mind.
Slide Nr 5Interlocking Burr Puzzles – Looking to improve your logical, spatial and creative reasoning skills? Consider these interlocking wooden Burr puzzles, which come in various shapes – from seeds to balls and stars – and which have been around since the 18th century. Your job is to disassemble and reassemble them. They’re accompanied by detailed instructions, but who needs them anyway? Not if you can bear with the Burr, bend your brain and keep fighting with it until you crack it, ultimately creating a symmetrical three-dimensional unit.
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Living
Tease Your Brain: 11 Puzzles To Sharpen The Mind.
Slide Nr 6String And Bead Puzzles – Challenge your problem-solving abilities with an old-school string and bead puzzle. They’re classic disentanglement problems, and the aim is to free one object or group of objects from another; in the case of this Gordian Octopus puzzle, you need to separate the middle ring from the hexagonal wooden structure. It’s a game of patience, and you never know when that first wave of inspiration will strike. But wait, there’s yet another challenge: to get it back into the original unsolved form. No scissors or cutting tools permitted.
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Living
Tease Your Brain: 11 Puzzles To Sharpen The Mind.
Slide Nr 7Lateral Thinking Puzzlers By Paul Sloane – With riddle-like questions posed in open-ended format, the puzzles in Paul Sloane’s bestseller will put your creative thinking skills to the test. Simply put, you’ll be given a set of strange situations with incomplete information, and your job is to figure out what’s going on by asking relevant questions. Best played in a group, the winner is the one who analyses the clues carefully and comes up with a logical yet out-of-the box solution. Remember, there’s no one right answer, though there’s one best solution. [Image reprinted with permission from Lateral Thinking Puzzles © 2016 by Paul Sloane. Published by Sterling Publishing Co., Inc. Illustrations by Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.]
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Living
Tease Your Brain: 11 Puzzles To Sharpen The Mind.
Slide Nr 8Rubik’s Cube, Speed Cube And X2 – The Rubik’s Cube, created by Hungarian inventor Ernő Rubik in 1974, was first used as a tool to teach and illustrate spatial relationships before it became one of the most popular brain teasers of all time. And it’s still frustratingly fun for those who attempt to unscramble it by twisting and turning the small cubes to get all six colours matched up on its six sides. If you’ve already cracked it, graduate to the next level of speed-cubing to the Shengshou Megaminx dodecahedron puzzle with 50 moveable parts, and try to get similar solid colours lined up – but this time, on all the twelve sides. And if that’s not enough, there’s the X-cube with 52 moving parts, 102 coloured stickers and approximately 125 decillion possible ways to arrange it. The challenge here is not just ordering the disordered colours, but also getting the puzzle back to its original X shape.
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Living
Tease Your Brain: 11 Puzzles To Sharpen The Mind.
Slide Nr 9Champions Of Illusion By Susana Martinez-Conde And Stephen Macknik – Intrigued by mind-boggling visual illusions? Prepare to bend your mind further with the delightful book Champions of Illusion: The Science Behind Mind-Boggling Images and Mystifying Brain Puzzles by cognitive scientists Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik. Besides a stunning selection of visual illusions (mind you, not the same ones you’ve been seeing everywhere), the book offers clear explanations on how and why they work. Many images in the book were selected from a contest for “The Best Illusion of The Year” and the remainder offer a new spin on the classics – perfect for all kinds of readers, from first-timers to specialists.
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Living
Tease Your Brain: 11 Puzzles To Sharpen The Mind.
Slide Nr 10Pento T Jigsaw By Jean Claude Constantin – Today’s jigsaw puzzles vary in complexity and scale, and have come a long way since 1760 when they were first imagined and used as a teaching aid in geography courses. Some evidence indicates that working on them exercises both the left and right brain lobes, besides facilitating the release of dopamine – the chemical responsible for learning and memory. So if you’re a jigsaw fiend, give the Pento T by Jean-Claude Constantin your best shot. This fine laser-cut wood packing puzzle looks deceptively easy, given the limited number of pieces, but puzzle fans say it’s fiendishly complex due to its intricate pattern featuring visually similar designs.
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Living
Tease Your Brain: 11 Puzzles To Sharpen The Mind.
Slide Nr 12The GCHQ Puzzle Books I And II – If you like crosswords, difficult riddles, secret codes or complex challenges, don’t miss this two-volume set of puzzle books by Britain’s secretive intelligence organisation GCHQ. Not for the faint of heart, the puzzles contained in volumes 1 and 2 are brain-bending and excruciatingly difficult, but not impossible to crack, having been put together by some of Britain’s best cryptographers and code breakers. What’s inside? Shapes, Wordgrid, I Spy, Sort Out The Characters, Word Hunting, Sudoku, Countdown, Cryptic Crosswords and even a GCHQ Puzzle Book Competition.
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