Mental Fitness

Bingo is not just a game that can make your bank balance bigger and thereby improve your financial fitness, it can also make you fitter mentally. But simply sitting in front of a computer screen listening to numbers being called won’t do the trick. In order to get maximum mental benefit from bingo, you need to actually engage your brain...

Offline bingo is the game that has most often been used by psychological researchers to measure the amount of impact the activity has on mental function, and for good reason. Offline bingo requires you to mark your own cards, keep your eyes and ears open and make your own claim if you win. Should you miss a number or fail to make a call when playing offline, you lose any prize that would have been due to you. Offline players therefore tend to pay a lot of attention to the game, and it is this sustained attention that brings the benefits.

But this is not to say that internet bingo can’t also be good for maintaining mental fitness, because it can. You will, however, need to adjust the way you normally play for at least some of the time. Our suggested guidelines are as follows:

• First, go to the options menu of your chosen online bingo room and turn off auto-daubing. This means you will need to daub your own numbers on your cards as they are called.

• Next, get into the habit on only buying as many tickets as you can see on your screen at any given time. Because you will be marking your cards manually, you will need to see those cards at all times.

• Play for half an hour or so by listening to the numbers called and daubing your numbers manually. Actually concentrate on the game rather than on the chat window or on typing “3tg” when you have three numbers to go.

If you take this advice and play as suggested for half an hour a day, you will be giving your brain enough stimulation to be worthwhile. The rest of the time you can of course set your software to auto-daub and play as many cards as you please.

Playing bingo won’t turn you into an Einstein unless you have that kind of intelligence to begin with (and few of us do). But what it can do is strengthen your memory, maintain your response reflexes and generally give your mind a good workout. Some would argue that crosswords are just as useful, but bingo is a lot more fun, and potentially a lot more profitable too!

21st May 2008