(Pando Hall)
Young woman with hands by face, close-up
Mike Peake
Blame Dr Kawashima. The neuroscientist helped to develop Brain Training, the Nintendo game that had us believing 10 minutes of play a day would turn us all into Einsteins. Those claims have turned out to be over-egged — but completing small, mental challenges every day will supposedly raise your IQ while helping to fend off brain-ageing diseases. And there’s no better place for a good cranial workout than on the web.
The most slickly designed of the online brain trainers costs £4.99 a month but there are 20 freebies to try. Follow a programme or just choose games of interest, from memory puzzles to speeding up reaction times.
Thousands of simple but addictive maths problems. The site was initially designed as a resource for teachers, and it’s free to use. The quick-fire format puts more emphasis on fast reactions than any deep understanding of the concepts, however.
Click on the “puzzle” section of this huge games site for brain trainers. The best is Anagrammatic, where you play an online competitor in a Countdown-style letters game.
Regular crossword-solving has been shown to delay brain degeneration. This club (£24.99 for 12 months through timesonline.co.uk) gives you access to 10 years of archived puzzles from The Times and The Sunday Times, both concise and cryptic.
Practise a new language by calling or emailing a native speaker. A million users and 115 languages are registered here — simply find someone who wants to learn English in return, and get talking.
Free to use and packed with links to free brain-training games — but without any way of tracking your progress. It’s hard to resist the animated Rubik’s Cube, where you can
get just as muddled online as you did with the real thing when you were 12.
It has been argued that brain-training games are no more scientifically beneficial than a spot of Tetris. So if you want to keep things simple, you’ll find the iconic block-shifting original to play online here — alongside many newer variations.
8 Kenexa
If you need to get in mental shape for the sort of psychometric tests now used by many prospective employers, this human resources company keeps practice papers at psl.co.uk. Use them online or download them as PDFs.
9 puzz.com
See if all your brain training is paying off by taking regular IQ tests. There are dozens to choose from here — take as many as you can and average the scores, avoiding the many efforts to flog you self-help courses.
Home to dozens of well-animated brain games, all fun and easy to use. Avoid the subject links at the top, however — they’ll just send you to Lumosity.
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