Solving problems involving mazes builds intelligence, keeps you sharp, wards off dementia, clears (broadens) old neural pathways and paves new ones, greatly expands your possibility thinking abilities, decision making abilities and your ability to visualize using your imagination. As an added bonus, working through mazes is a meditative-type exercise and actually helps discipline your ability to focus without 'wandering off' [like your eccentric Uncle Ned at a family barbecue].
Mazes are actually pictorially analogous to the structure of the physical brain. Navigating a maze might just be similar (on a very small and simplified scale) to navigating neuronal corridors of the mind...
Another amazing (pun intended) by-product of the repeated exercise of escaping (i.e., running through or navigating) mazes is that despite the element of trial and error which may necessarily be involved -- you find a way that doesn't work, go back to the point where you believe that you might have taken a fateful wrong turn, and go in a different direction -- many maze champions are very good at somehow "anticipating" the tricks and techniques used by certain maze designers. This is a fascinating phenomenon.
If you look at a maze from a vantage point, reasonably high above it, so that you can view the entire layout, it will be mush easier to navigate when it comes time to actually run it. This is a dramatic example of perspective, and how it influences the way people think. If you are just thrown into a maze that you have never scanned from above in totality, the whole exercise becomes less a study in memory and navigation than a test of trial and error, learning curves and intuition.
You can find a variety of mazes with which to test yourself with at these sites:
http://www.mazes.org.uk/
http://www.clickmazes.com/
Now have some fun.
Douglas E Castle for The Braintenance Blog
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