Letters to the Editor
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Brain games
There are only two brain games I have used over the years, chess and 'GO'. Usually, however, I have to play these with a computer because my wife loses against me, and therefore hates both!
Apart from that, I read in some issue of The Economist a while back that games like 'Sudoku' are largely a waste of time, and it's much better to push your brain toward a specfic intellectual goal. For me that's in plasma physics research, and also some celestial mechanics. (I always love to get out my old folders, notebooks and go through the conditions for ion-acoustic waves and the Koretweg deVries equation, not to mention using Kepler's eqn. to locate the position of Mars in 2077.
Those are the sort of activities that keep the gray matter sharp, not trying to fit a sequence of numbers onto an array in different directions. (Which in any case, would only activate a few neuronal assemblies at a time, since the activity is basically the same each time - only with slight variation in order, sequencing)
What we do know, is that adherence to religion and religious beliefs rots the brain and results in atrophy of many different regions. After all, one simply ceases to think and takes virtually everything on "faith".