Just as body requires physical exercise to remain fit, our brain also needs some stimulation to stay active. Similar to any other muscle in the body, our brain is also a muscle. We may consider that our forgetfulness is age related but memory lapses or an overload brain can occur at any stage. Research has shown that keeping our brain active with new , challenging activities is the ideal way to our sharpen our mind, that’s where crosswords sudoku puzzles, monopoly, reading books play an important role in stretching the brain. You be surprised to see that the brain functions like it fourteen years younger. Researchers at the University of California-Irvine studied hundreds of mice altered to make them develop abnormalities known as plaques and tangles in brain tissue that are considered hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease in people-- swimming in a tub of water until finding a submerged platform to stand on -- slowed the development in the mice of those two abnormalities. Kim Green, one of the researchers’s said "The notable thing was that just by learning occasionally, they still had a very remarkable effect on the Alzheimer's disease pathology, hence it suggests that in humans, if you learn more and more and more, it's going to have a huge, useful effect”. He further said more highly educated people are less likely to develop Alzheimer's than people with less education.

One study suggested that that exercising one's mind is important to staving off Alzheimer's disease, the degenerative brain malady that is the most common form of dementia among the elderly.
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