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BRAIN TEASERS, OPTICAL ILLUSIONS, PUZZLES, & RIDDLES

Your brain, just like other muscles in your body, needs to be exercised daily.  Here are some fun and challenging brain benders to keep you sharp.  For more brain teasers, optical illusions, puzzles, & riddles visit http://brainden.com - one of the greatest collections of Riddles, Logic Games, Puzzles, and Brain Teasers on the web.  To learn more about how exercising your brain can greatly improve your mental performance, click here.

Which Bag Contains the Counterfeit Coins?
Imagine you have 10 bags full of coins, and each bag contains 1000 coins. One of the bags contains counterfeit coins. A real coin weighs 1 gram, while a counterfeit coin weighs 1.1 grams. Using a scale just one time, how can you identify which bag contains the counterfeit coins?

Did you weigh your options correctly? Click here to reveal the answer Take 1 coin from the first bag, 2 coins from the second bag... 10 coins from the tenth bag and weigh the picked coins. If all the coins weighed the same amount, the scale would measure (1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10=55 grams). Since we know that one bag contains counterfeit coins, we can determine which bag it is by reading the scale. If it reads 55.1 grams we know the counterfeit coins are in bag 1. If it reads 55.2 grams we know the counterfeit coins are in bag 2, and so on.

Does this image bring together the past and the present?


What do you see? Click here to reveal the answer This is an optical illusion. Within this image is the face of both a very young woman and a very old woman. Hint: Each is looking toward the left.

The Case of the Colored Caps
Four men are standing in a line as shown above and they cannot turn their heads. There is a brick wall between A and B that they cannot see through. They know that they each have one cap, and that of the four caps two are black and two are white. They cannot see the color of the cap that they are wearing. In order to be released from the line, they must call out the color of their cap. If they are wrong, no one can leave. They are not allowed to talk to each other, and they have been given ten minutes to figure out their cap color. After 1 minute, one of them calls out.  Which one called out and how can he be certain?


Better put your thinking cap on for this one... Click here to reveal the answer C would call out. If B and C were wearing the same color cap D would know that he was wearing the opposite color. Since D hasn't called out, C knows that his cap must be a different color that B's cap. Since C can see that B is wearing a white cap, he knows that he must be wearing a black cap.

Hotel Bill and the Missing Dollar
Three men check into a hotel. The manager charges them $30 for one room with three beds which they share. The men go to their room and settle in, after a few moments the manager realizes a mistake. The room rate was only $25. He over charged the three men, $5. The manager sent for the bellhop to return the $5 to the three men. On his way to the room the bellhop realizes that he can't split $5 between 3 men so he decides to give each man $1 and pocket the remaining $2 as a tip. The bellman returns the $1 to each man. In the three mens' minds they each paid $9 for the room, or a total of $27, include the $2 tip the bellhop kept and that equals $29.

But, what happened to the other dollar? Click here to reveal the answer It’s a play on words to lead you to believe the answer is $30 and tricks you into adding the $2 instead of subtracting it as follows: 3x$9=$27, then minus the $2 which is the $25 which is what they paid for the room. If you take what they ultimately paid for the room ($25) and add the $3 (the $1 each man received back), and then the $2 tip the bellhop kept as a tip you would reach the original $30 that was paid.

Recent Findings – Journal of the American Medical Association

According to a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA):

“Ten sessions of exercises to boost reasoning skills, memory and mental processing speed staved off mental decline in middle-aged and elderly people in the first definitive study to show that honing intellectual skills can bolster the mind in the same way that physical exercise protects and strengthens the body. The researchers also showed that the benefits of the brain exercises extended well beyond the specific skills the volunteers learned.”

Experts interpret this study as a call to action for anyone who has ever worried about losing their mental acuity in the future.

"If you think you have come to a time in your life when new learning is impossible and there are no benefits of continuing mental activity, the study shows that for a large number of people that this is not true," added Dr. Marsiske, a psychologist at the University of Florida at Gainesville.

Interestingly enough, researchers noted that mental skills are sometimes able to be used to compensate for physical disabilities; e.g. Knowing how to figure out directions and find a new route on a map could allow someone to retain mobility even after their night vision deterioration approaches the point where driving on particular streets becomes problematic.

Mental Muscles - Improve Memory,  Brain Processes,  Problem Solving/Planning Capabilities

It was once claimed that adult brains could not create new neurons. This was repudiated by Berkeley researchers, Marian Diamond and Mark Rosenzweig.

The "mental muscles" we can train include attention, stress and emotional management, memory, visual, spatial, auditory processes and language, motor coordination and executive functions like planning and problem-solving.