AARP is an American nonprofit, nonpartisan organization with a membership of nearly 38 million dedicated to empowering people 50 and older to choose how they age. It also aims to change the way America defines aging.
Staying Sharp is an AARP program that educates about the pillars of brain health. To help you live a brain-healthy lifestyle, it offers activities, recipes, videos, Brain Health Challenges, and more. Following the guidance from the Global Council on Brain Health, Staying Sharp translates the science into brain-boosting actions.
When you explore Staying Sharp, you'll be introduced to plenty of brain and memory improvement games. With the belief that it's a fun way to take a break, AARP curated a selection of brain games for seniors. Here are some of these AARP games you can play daily.
Restaurant
If you have been amazed by restaurant waiters on how they take orders and remember which food is for whom even after the diners have shuffled seats, this game is for you. Here, you get to play the waiter's role.
Each diner will order a drink, main dish, side dish, and dessert. Then, following an intentional (but optional) distraction task related to the calorie content in certain foods, you will be challenged to remember each diner's orders.
Visual memory and working memory are two aspects of memory involved in this game. This game also includes verbal information (customers' orders) and spatial information (their positions around the table). Both left and right brain hemispheres will be activated.
Tower of Babel
You will have to associate each word to the right image after memorizing words in a foreign language and a photo of the object to which they refer. More than merely a memory exercise, this will also show you the wide variety of sounds in the world's languages.
With unknown words and pronunciations from foreign languages, this exercise stimulates your auditory memory. It also targets both concentration and auditory discrimination.
Around the World in 80 Trips
Embark on a grand tour of the world's most beautiful regions.
You will be asked to memorize two tour itineraries that you can choose from a list of destinations, including Sri Lanka, Madagascar, and Brazil. Itineraries consist of the names of the places you visit and the associated pictures of those places.
This exercise trains visual and spatial memory concerning information about the environment. To succeed, you'll need proper orientation and perceptive skills. Some various suggestions or hints might help you improve your memorization capabilities.
Split Words Arcade
You're looking for a flower's name. It is at your tongue's tip. You know it begins with "am ..." What is it?
You need to combine syllables or fragments from the game table to form complete words as quickly as possible. Target words are categorized into themes, and you have an option of two or three syllables/fragments to work with.
The brain area exercised in this game is the left temporal lobe that gets activated when the retrieval of information is called upon. This task helps you practice getting words from your repertoire of languages quickly. One can see each syllable as a phonetic cue that facilitates word retrieval.
How To Get the Games
While researchers continue to delve into brain games, there is no consensus that brain games can have a significant long-term effect. Although there is more to brain health than games, playing them can help alleviate stress because they are fun and engaging. They also improve your memory!
To access these fun brain games, you have to subscribe to an AARP Membership and activate Staying Sharp, which is an included benefit. If you are not an AARP member yet, you can purchase the program with the Brain Health Assessment for $35.99 per year.
Conclusion
These are specially-designed games that stimulate certain regions of your brain and help develop the skills associated with them. Playing these titles will help you keep your wits sharp and problem-solving skills lightning fast.
