Want a healthy brain?

Doing a crossword with three friends stimulates activity in more brain regions than completing it alone does. Most of us suffer from moments of memory loss — walking into a room and forgetting what you were looking for or grasping for the name of the person you have just bumped into on the street.

You could be suffering from brain anaemia, according to psychologist Jane G. Goldman.

She’s not talking about the nutritional condition caused by a lack of iron: she means a lack of new experiences and mental challenges that the brain needs to keep it in tip-top condition and in the best health.

‘The brain is not too different from the rest of your body,’ she says. ‘It needs to be nourished.’

Without adequate challenges, such as learning a new skill or taking up a hobby, she says, our brain cells start to wither. These cells (known as neurons), become less active and fire fewer electrical signals, and their nutrient and oxygen supply is gradually reduced. It is to keep these neurons active and nourished that we are told to do activities, such as crosswords, every day.

However, Goldman says that sitting down and tackling a Sudoku puzzle on your own isn’t enough to halt this brain atrophy. For these puzzles to keep the brain agile and ward off Alzheimer’s, you have to do them with other people.

We have evolved as social animals, she says, and completing tasks in groups stimulates and strengthens our neurons, boosting brain power and memory.

She suggests that just as we keep our bodies in shape with aerobics classes, so we should keep our grey matter fighting fit by tackling puzzles in groups. She CALLS this ‘brainercising’ and recommends that mental exercises are done in teams. Exercises include tasks such as recalling a string of numbers after listening to them being read aloud. This challenge is called digit span.

Professor Felicia Huppert, director of the Wellbeing Institute in Cambridge, believes there may be some science to this theory.

‘There are benefits to doing tasks collectively, as the social brain would also be engaged,’ she says.

And why should involving the social brain help?

Well, more than two decades ago researchers at the University of Leuven in Belgium began to report that older people did better on memory tests if they did exercises in groups.

The effect has been re-tested several times with the same result, most recently in 2009.

Studies suggest that being with others encourages our brain to develop new connections throughout the brain, not just in one particular area.  So doing a crossword with three friends would stimulate activity in more brain regions than completing it alone would do.

The benefits of group brain activity seem to be linked to competitiveness, too — it seems we learn better if we have goals such as wanting to be as good as someone else. We also learn better if we are rewarded, such as receiving congratulations from others.