Healthy Mind exercises

Here's an exercise that will challenge your brain to think outside of the box.

Your task is to join the 9 dots using 5 lines without lifting pen or pencil from the paper. (There are a couple of ways to do this.)

Now do the same exercise but use only 4 lines, using the same principles.

Once you've achieved the task, you can view the solutions.

Remember, if what you're doing isn't getting you the result you want, find a different way and think outside the box!

This fun brain booster requires working in pairs. Get your buddy to put, say, 10 items, chosen randomly, on a tray. This could be a selection of objects from around the house. Give yourself a minute or so to make up a story using pictures and a lot of imagination. The more outrageous, the better, as this is likely to increase the likelihood of remembering all the objects.

For example, here are 10 objects chosen to illustrate the technique:

• Pen
• Clock
• Cheese
• Spoon
• Toothbrush
• Cup
• Saucer
• Book
• Baseball cap
• Tennis ball

The story might go something like:

Spoon is standing up, leaning against the clock, wearing a baseball cap, playing with the tennis ball, bouncing it over to toothbrush who is trying to read his book while making notes with the pen, drinking from the cup and saucer, and nibbling the cheese.

Next time you try this, reduce the time and/or increase the number of objects.

As a guide, this is how you can score:

8-10: Congratulations, you are above average.
5-7: This is around average – practice will make perfect!
0-4: Room for improvement, as the old school reports might have said! Enjoy the art of playing with this and you'll see a remarkable difference over time.

Sudoku is an excellent way for adults and children to develop their logic skills while having fun. People often think that you need to be good at maths when they see sudoku using numbers. To prove that this isn't the case, this sudoku puzzle uses nine healthy food icons instead of numbers.

The Sudoku Puzzle consists of a grid of 9 squares wide and 9 squares deep. The lines of squares running horizontally are called rows, and the lines running vertically are called columns. The white grid is further divided by the nine 3 X 3 square 'boxes'.

Each row, column and box must end up containing all of the healthy foods, and each food can only appear once in a row, column or box.

See an example of a correctly completed sudoku puzzle.

To select an icon, simply click on it and drag it to the square you want to put it in. If you change your mind, simply drag it back to the starting point below the board or move it to another square. Remember, those that appear at the beginning of the game cannot be moved.

  » Play Sudoku (new window)

To play Pairs you use your short-term memory (also called your ‘working memory’). This part of your memory can hold about 7 bits of information – for example 7 numbers or letters. It's your transient memory store which you use when, for example, repeating a 7-digit phone number before writing it down.

For each card you must remember what it is, and where it is. That's two bits of information out of the possible 7 in your short-term memory. Therefore in total you transiently hold information on 3 or 4 cards. Once your short term memory is filled with 3 or 4 cards, it searches for a matching card. As soon as a pair is found your short-term memory immediately discards that card and has space to remember another.

The board has 21 pairs of healthy foods and drinks spread out randomly. Click on any two cards to turn them over to see if you've got a pair. If they don't match they'll flip back again. Once you've found two cards that match they will remain facing up. The aim is to match all of the pairs as quickly as possible.

  » Play Pairs (new window)