Five of the best apps for brain fitness / mind training

"Brain fitness" is a term used to describe the activity of solving logical puzzles on a daily basis, which should result in a slow improvement of one's cognitive abilities, and reducing the risks of age-related dementia diseases. It's mostly a hypothesis, due to the fact that a large portion of the inner workings of the human brain are still a mystery to science. However, it's a widely adopted understanding that the more you use your noggin, the more "in shape" it will be – something that has been proven true for most of our body parts (Neurogenesis theories support this, stating that regular stimulation of the brain cells increase their connections to neighboring cells and lengthen their life span).

So, how does one "do" brain fitness? Puzzles and logical games have been a favorite pastime of people for ages now. Chess has existed from as early as the 6th century, while other board games date to thousands of years BC, and their perseverance through time is probably a good enough proof that people love to train their logical minds – and to compare their progress to others!

In modern times, logical games have made the jump to PC and consoles in the form of quests or plain puzzlers. And, of course, in the post-PC era, we all have a gaming-capable device in our pockets at all times.

So, scientists and developers have teamed up to create various puzzle-based apps and services that are focused on "brain fitness". The idea is simple – play 3 to 5 short, time-dependant, and challenging puzzles on a daily basis and increase various aspects of your mind's prowess – focus, attention-to-detail, spacial thinking, language skills, and many others. The apps are designed so that you can blast through a training session for about 10 minutes, but you can keep playing beyond your scheduled exercise, if you feel the need or desire to do so.

Below, we picked out the 5 best ones that we stumbled upon. They are all free-to-play, but offer Pro subscription plans for increased results, should you feel the need to hurry things along. Check them out!

Lumosity