Brain teasers are like metaphors; they are great only if you understand them. According to Sharp Brains, an organization dedicated to tracking health and wellness applications of brain science, brain teasers can improve cognitive abilities and even reduce the effects of dementia. This is a great excuse to spend your afternoon surfing the web for the best brain teasers known to man. Here are 9 brain teasers that can sharpen your mind and fool your friends! Answers are at the bottom.

1. What am I?

With pointed fangs it sits in wait,
With piercing force its doles out fate,
Over bloodless victims proclaiming its might,
Eternally joining in a single bite.
What am I?

2. Heads or tails?

You flip a coin four times and get heads each time. What is the probability that you will get heads on your next coin flip?

3. Useless?

Who makes it, has no need of it.
Who buys it, has no use for it.
Who uses it can neither see nor feel it.
What is it?

4. Not all seeing

What has an eye but cannot see?

5. Big man small shoes

Paul's height is six feet, he's an assistant at a butcher's shop, and wears size seven shoes. What does he weigh?

6. Look it up

Which word in the dictionary is spelled incorrectly?

7. Dreams

Imagine you are in a dark room. How do you get out?

8. Rising tide

A ladder hangs over the side of a ship anchored in a port. The bottom rung touches the water. The distance between rungs is 20 cm and the length of the ladder is 180 cm. The tide is rising at the rate of 15 cm each hour.
When will the water reach the seventh rung from the top?

9. A cigarette lighter

There are three men in a boat with four cigarettes but no matches. How do they manage to smoke?

Answers

1. A stapler

2. 1/2

3. A coffin

4. A needle

5. Meat

6. Incorrectly

7. Stop imagining.

8. Never. If the water is rising, the boat will be rising too, and so will the ladder.

9. One of the men throws a cigarette off the boat to make the boat a cigarette lighter.