Trivia Games for the Elderly

From LoveToKnow Seniors

Trivia games for the elderly are ideal for maintaining cognitive function and awareness. Trivia games provide an interactive tool for friends and family members as well as friendly challenges that not only stimulate the mind, but also the social skills.
Importance Trivia Games for the Elderly

Trivia games for the elderly provide mental stimulation, an important component to mental and cognitive health in aging minds. Brain teasers, crossword puzzles, word finds and trivia games all require multiple areas of the brain to interact in order to process and retrieve data. The brain is a muscle, if it is not used it can become atrophied.

Regular mental stimulation can actually delay the onset of diseases such as dementia and Alzheimer’s which impair cognitive functioning. Trivia games require ‘memory’ and stimulate the pathways through the cerebral cortex required to link the question to the image to the answer.
Trivial Pursuit and Other Board Games

Board games are a popular past time for senior citizens, particularly if they are grandparents. Children love to play board games. As children age, engaging them in trivia based games is one way to encourage mental activity. Board games are a good social activity for seniors to participate in with friends or at local community or senior centers.

For solitary seniors, online trivia games as well as trivia books can be a way to keep the mental stimulation flowing. Trivia books are available that allow seniors to answer trivia questions from decades past. While these types of trivia games can be fun it is important that trivia be widely based and come from multiple time periods.

In most cases of memory loss, the most distant memories actually remain intact while more recent memories are the ones that begin to atrophy. Part of this is due to the what happens while the body is asleep. Mental processes are reinforced during rest periods, if the brain is not stimulated during the day or recently acquired memories emphasized, then those processes are not reinforced.