10 Puzzles That Test Your Brain. Can You Solve Them?
There is nothing that trains your brain and your mind and keeps it active like solving puzzles. To get your brain moving, try solving these mental puzzles that will test your mind, make you think and feel good. They will also help you test your ability to reason. Can you solve them? Find out if you can!
10 puzzles that test your brain
Riddle 1
John’s father tells his son he will give him two banknotes. He says, “If you put them together, they give six dollars, but one of them is not a dollar bill.”
What are the two banknotes?
Riddle 2
Which day of the year do fraudsters and counterfeiters talk less?
Riddle 3
John gets up in the morning and finds that the lamp in his room is not working. He opens a drawer filled with gloves. Inside the drawer there are 10 black gloves and 10 dark blue gloves.
How many should he choose to make sure he gets a pair of the same color?
Riddle 4
How many times can the number 1 be subtracted from 1111?
Riddle 5
Two people are driving in a car. The youngest passenger is the daughter of the oldest passenger, but the oldest passenger is not her father.
Who is it?
Riddle 6
In a race, a runner passes the person who comes in second place. What position are they in?
Riddle 7
How would a person falling from a 50-story building be able to survive?
Riddle 8
A woman buys a parrot from a pet store, and the pet dealer promises that it will be able to repeat everything it hears. The woman returns with the animal a week later because it has not uttered a single sound, even though she has spoken to it.
But the pet dealer has not deceived her. What happened?
Riddle 9
You are sitting in a bus and 18 people are with you. At the next stop, 5 people get off, while 13 get on the bus. When you arrive at the next bus stop, 21 are off and 4 are on. What color are the bus driver’s eyes?
Riddle 10
A farmer has 10 rabbits, 20 horses and 40 pigs. If we were to call the pigs “horses”, how many horses does he have?
Were these puzzles difficult for you? How many do you think you guessed right?
Here are the answers so you can see for yourself how well you did:
- Answer 1. A five-dollar bill and a one-dollar bill. John’s father tells his son that one of the notes is not a one-dollar note… but the other could well be.
- Answer 2. Winter solstice, because it is the shortest day of the year.
- Answer 3. 11. Let us consider the worst case scenario where John takes all 10 right (or left) gloves of each color. This would make it impossible for him to get some that match. Only one more of each would be enough to create a few of the same.
- Answer 4. Only once, because after that you would subtract it from the numbers 1110, 1109, 1108…
- Answer 5. Her mother.
- Answer 6. Second place
- Answer 7. If they fall from the first floor. The riddle says nothing about which floor the person falls from.
- Answer 8. The parrot is deaf.
- Answer 9. The color of your eyes!
- Answer 10. You still want 20. Giving them another name does not turn them into horses.
Puzzles are amazing!
Riddles designed to test your mind often cause you to try something called lateral reasoning. This is a form of argumentation that consists in solving problems in a creative way, as defined by Edward de Bono in 1967.
Throughout history, a lot of puzzles and puzzles have been developed that are similar to traditional problems, but which test the logical principles and cognitive abilities of the person who has to solve them, thus helping them to train their brain.
Lateral reasoning is different from the linear or direct reasoning that most of us are used to.
In the traditional way of reasoning, you logically go from one step to the next, while with lateral reasoning you will have to abandon this process. This forces you to give up certain inhibitions. This forces you to solve problems in different ways.
Ultimately, one trains the brain by dealing with tasks that are “different”. Therefore, puzzles are ideal for training the brain, and therefore have health benefits. We hope you enjoy these puzzles that will test your mind!
