Apps for Your Brain

1. CogniFit Brain Fitness
Improve cognitive abilities, such as memory and concentration, with sleek, fun and addictive games designed by neuroscientists. Users can track progress and access insights about overall brain health. Competitive players can challenge friends, too. After an initial quiz, the app adapts each game’s difficulty to your profile and gives you recommendations based on your results. Developers found that users saw improvement by spending at least 20 minutes, two to three times a week, playing the games. (Free for four games or full subscription for $13 a month or $120; available for iOS)

2. Eidetic
Eidetic uses a technique called spaced repetition to help you memorize anything from important phone numbers to interesting words or facts. It works differently from typical brain training apps by using items that have meaning and context, like your beau’s phone number, bank account details, or a new quote worth reciting. Notifications remind you when it’s time to test yourself and spaces out tests over time to make sure you retain the information in long-term memory. (Free; available on iOS)

3. Happify
Train your brain to be happier? Yep, research shows that some activities help build your ability to conquer negative thoughts, show gratitude, cope with stress, and empathize — all essential ingredients for a fuller, happier life. Using fundamentals of positive psychology, which involves focusing on the strengths and virtues that enable individuals to create fulfilling lives, the app’s quizzes, polls and gratitude journal — combined with a positive community — gradually teach life-changing habits. The goal is to build these skills and keep users smiling all day. (Free; available for iOS)

15 Brain Teasers and Games for Mental Exercise

While brain-training apps will never completely take the place of face-to-face intervention and prevention approaches, Dr. Dennis sees their potential as an adjunct to other stress-reducing activities, whether that’s exercise, yoga, or seeing a therapist. She adds, “Apps can also be gateway treatments that empower the individual to make positive changes, which can then lead to seek out other health promotion tools.” And while technology can help sharpen the brain and calm the nerves, true mental health is much more holistic. “What’s most important is feeling you have meaning in life and social connections,” says Dr. Kaslow. “It doesn’t mean you have to be happy, but it does have to do with having purpose.” And there’s no app for that…yet.

1. Can you count?: Basketball attention experiment (Interactive).

2. Which way is the bus heading?.

3. Words in your brain: do you know where words are “stored” in your brain?.

4. Please Spot the Differences.

5. Do you think you know the colors?: Quick, try the Stroop Test.

6. Clinically proven Stress Management tip.

7. Riddle for the Whole Brain: The Blind Beggar.

8. What is going on with these pictures?.

9. Brain Teasers for the Weekend: a few challenges to exercise your attention and working memory.

10. Consider Linda‘s job prospects: riddle, or obvious?.

11. Count the Fs in this sentence.

12. Please find the missing number here.

13. How many… exercise your Frontal and Parietal lobes.

14. Mental Imagery and Spatial Rotation challenge.

15. Enjoy this Sunday Afternoon Quiz.