by Michael Capraro

Created on: October 08, 2008   Last Updated: October 20, 2008

Keeping your mind sharp or sharpening it further should not only be fun, but will also enhance your enjoyment of life by making you more attuned to, and hence better able to appreciate, the world and events around you. People tend naturally to gravitate to the familiar and comfortable when looking for mental stimulation. I suggest you look for and purposefully take new pathways. If you've mastered crossword puzzles, don't buy that next crossword puzzle book. Instead, trysomething different, like Sudoku. Already a whizz at Sudoku? Try Kakuru for a new challenge. If you're good at word games, try some math puzzles. A master of numbers and equations and solving problems on your own? Try a word game with competitors like Boggle (R - Parker Brothers). The idea is to stimulate and exercise new regions in the brain to build new neural pathways.

We taught our kids to play battleship the old way, filling in squares on grid paper. We would take these grids along on trips. While driving the expressway, I could not use pencil and paper (and don't you try that either), so I played the game in my head while the kids used the grid paper in the back seat. That was great mental exercise, and fun! No, I never cheated.

It's not just a matter of games and puzzles. Be creative! Look for opportunities to do things differently. Simple things, like cooking oatmeal. If you always stir the pan with your right hand, practice using the left instead. It will be awkward at first, but you'll get the hang of it soon enough. You can just feel those new neural pathways abuilding. Brushing teeth? - same thing. Always stick your left leg in the trousers first? You got it - next time, right leg first. Always mount the bicycle from the left? There's another opportunity. Dealing cards, playing catch or ping-pong, try switching hands now and then.

The only poem we memorized in High School that I still remember more than 40 years later is the prelude to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. That's because we memorized it in the Old English form. That made it very different, and it stuck with me. Better yet, try learning a new language. Maybe you had a technical or business oriented curriculum in school that left little time for humanities, arts and other disciplines. So, perhaps now's the time to take that astronomy class you missed out on, or the art appreciation class or psych class, or maybe even that karate class you wondered about.

Learning new disciplines, doing old things in new ways, these can spice up your life and sharpen those mental skills.

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