Do you lose your keys, forget where you stashed your sunglasses and then make a crack about how your memory isn’t what it used to be? If so, you can take steps to boost your brainpower and feel better about occasional mental misfires.

One top way to stay mentally sharp is to exercise your brain, according to Harvard Medical School. In fact, mental exercise may “activate processes that help maintain individual brain cells and stimulate communication among them.”

Top ways to get a mental workout include:

  • Acting as a mentor or teacher
  • Learning a new skill
  • Taking up a hobby
  • Volunteering for a good cause

But there’s another way to get some mental exercise that’s easy, fun and can be done at home — solve our In the Balance brain teaser. This math and logic puzzle gives you three perfectly balanced scales with different shapes on each side. A fourth scale has shapes only on the left side. You need to study the three balanced scales to figure out how many shapes are needed to balance out the last one.

Tackling brain teasers like this can jog your brain and strengthen your synapses in a fun way. This brain teaser works the parts of the brain that handle math, numbers and spatial relationships. These parts of your brain are essential for everyday tasks like budgeting, doubling a recipe and comparison shopping at the grocery store.

Oh, and here’s one more easy and fast way to improve your memory: bite your tongue when you get the urge to make a quip about your aging brain. Research shows that negative stereotypes about aging and memory can actually be self-fulfilling. Middle-aged and older people do better on memory challenges after being exposed to positive messages about aging and preserving memory.

So go ahead, believe in your brainpower and take on this brain teaser with confidence.

In the Balance Puzzle 2

How’d you do? Click here to check your work.


Did you solve the puzzle correctly? Leave a comment to let us know how you did and what you thought of this puzzle.