12 Ways To Tease Your Brain

Don’t let your brain become bored and get accustomed to mental loafing. Tease your brain! Practice thinking and increase your intelligence! I’ll show you some different ways to do just that.

I won’t go into great detail here, this article is rather meant to provide a kind of overview, so you’ll probably need to read some additional resources to be able to actually apply the methods.

You might feel a little exhausted after trying some of those techniques, but that’s just fine. You wouldn’t expect feeling extremely vigorous at the end of a marathon either, would you?

But the intensity of the individual brain teasers is very different. Some methods will only be a light stimulation while others will significantly increase your intelligence if you use them over a certain period of time. Try out for yourself what works best for you.

1. Optical illusions: Watching optical illusions doesn’t lead to great intelligence, but it’s an entertaining way to generate some stimulation for your brain.
2. Mental calculations: You’d be surprised by what you can calculate mentally in almost no time if you know some easy techniques and take the time to practice. And there are virtually no limits. Moreover, you can probably think of plenty of everyday problems that require some kind of calculation.
3. Mathematical problems: I’m talking about real mathematics here. The kind of maths you don’t need a lot of numbers for. The kind of maths that requires a lot of abstract and logical thinking. It’s just a great workout for your brain and it doesn’t need to be boring at all. (Read Lockhart’s Lament if you want to know what math actually is.)
4. Logic puzzles: There are a lot of logic games that you can play in your spare time or whenever you are bored. They are available at all different degrees of difficulty and some of them are quite entertaining.
5. Riddles: Solving riddles is funny and forces you to think. Besides, you appear kind of intelligent if you can solve them
6. Visualization exercises: Maybe you’ve already heard about image streaming. It’s a perfect example for what I mean by visualization exercises. It is said that it can increase your intelligence. Although I don’t know if that’s true, I know that visualization exercises help you to learn more about your own mind. (Visit WinWenger.com for more information about image streaming.)
7. Writing with your non-dominant hand: You’ve probably already tried to do that some time ago. If you did, you should know about the effectiveness of this task. If you did not, you should really give it a try.
8. Memory training: Learn how to use your memory. It’s not only a way to train your brain, it’s also very helpful in everyday situations if you know how to remember everything you want to remember.
9. Learn to play an instrument: It’s hard to say by how much this can benefit your intelligence, but it definitely leads to some extra brain muscles if you learn new movements and train the coordination of your fingers, hands or arms. (You may also learn new songs instead if you already know how to play an instrument.)
10. Paradoxons: Thinking about paradoxons can be very stimulating. It’s surely not the ultimate way to acquire intelligence, but somehow I like paradoxons. The funny thing about them is that they are all created by human beings, there are no contradictions by nature.
11. Posing questions to yourself: Philosophize. This leads to new insights and requires some slight mental effort.
12. Doing several things at the same time: This is a tough one. Most people don’t even know that you can train the ability to do several things like writing with both hands and speaking at the same time. In fact, there are artists who perform this kind of feat live on stage. You could read The Multiple Mentality Course by Harry Kahne to learn how to do it.