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Review: Bend Your Brain (From the Minds Behind “Marbles” The Brain Store)

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Bend Your Brain
Bend Your Brain: 151 Puzzles, Tips, and Tricks to Blow (and Grow) Your Mind has a few questions for you: Want to get your frontal lobe breaking a sweat? Make your blood pump to your cerebellum? Stretch your occipital lobe to its limits?

If you’re as interested in mental fitness and brain health as I am, you’ll answer this question with a question of your own: How soon can we begin?!

Fortunately, you can begin the second you get your hands on this outstanding book. Bend Your Brain: 151 Puzzles, Tips, and Tricks to Blow (and Grow) Your Mind is actually more than a book, if we’re being honest here. It’s more of a workout program for the part of our body that is probably taken more for granted than any other part.  Which is perfectly ridiculous when you consider that it runs the whole shebang.

Bend Your Brain
From the Back Cover:

Then you need to bend your brain! This first book from the team behind Marbles: The Brain Store, a chain devoted to building better brains, offers puzzles and brain teasers to help enhance memory, build problem-solving skills, and reduce stress.
Since Marbles started helping people play their way to a healthier brain, they’ve sold, solved, and been stumped by more than their fair share of puzzles. Along the way, they’ve learned which puzzles tie people in knots (not in a good way) and which ones make the neurons downright giddy. With the help of their in-house team of BrainCoaches and access to cutting-edge neuroscience, they’ve designed these puzzles to keep your mind flexible and fit.
Arranged in five key brain categories—visual perception, word skills, critical thinking, coordination, and memory—Bend Your Brain offers a variety of puzzles ranging from mind-warming (easy) to mind-blowing (hard!):

·  Connecting the dots? More like working your spatial-orientation skills.
·  Identifying famous smiles? Flexing your visual memory.
·  Taking a closer look at your keyboard? Coding, storing, and retrieving.
·  Word-doku? Summoning cognitive abilities like appraisal, inference, impulse control, and evaluation.
·  Word scrambles? Tapping your brain’s association areas.

Your brain is your most important muscle, so let the brain-building begin! –  Bend Your Brain: 151 Puzzles, Tips, and Tricks to Blow (and Grow) Your Mind

Bend Your Brain
I have to say, I love everything about “Bend Your Brain.”  I know the STELLAR reputation Marbles: The Brain Store has in the mental fitness world.  When it comes to brain fitness, Marbles is “all in.”  They invest their hearts, bodies, and souls into discovering how the brain works, what it needs to keep working at an optimum level, where problems can arise, and what steps can be taken to avoid these problems.  I’d have as much confidence in their teachings on brain health as I would Rachael Ray’s teachings on cooking, Jillian Michael’s teachings on physical fitness, Albert Pujols’ teachings on swinging a baseball bat…

Well, you get the idea. We’re talking about experts in their chosen field.

MARBLES: THE BRAIN STORE is in malls across the country. They’ve been featured in Good Housekeeping, Real Simple, USA Today, and Wired, as well as on the Today show and Martha Stewart Living.  Like I said… experts.

While the book is flexible, the cover is made of a very sturdy material – it isn’t the type of “romance novel” paper covers that dog-ear or tear. It’s ideal for curling up in a comfy chair with a pencil and a hot Chai Tea Latte as you treat your mind to a FUN and STIMULATING workout.  I’m, perhaps, more familiar with brain games and brain puzzles than the average person. Another one of my blogs (“Out of Bounds“) involves mental fitness and brain health.  While doing research for the articles on “Out of Bounds,” I’ve bought and used countless books with “brain stimulating” puzzles.

Frankly, there are quite a few on the market that are outstanding. However, the puzzles throughout Bend Your Brain: 151 Puzzles, Tips, and Tricks to Blow (and Grow) Your Mind are different from other puzzles I’ve seen in other books. Bend Your Brain does a much better job of letting you know WHY you need each type of puzzle.  I also love the fact that the puzzles address the five key brain categories (visual perception, word skills, critical thinking, coordination, and memory).

What good would it be to focus on just one or two?!?!

If I were to recommend one book for the individual who is interested in protecting and strengthening their mind, this would be the book.  The puzzles are a PERFECT blend of challenging, very challenging, and OMG challenging.  What’s more, they’re a lot of fun!

If you’re looking to strengthen your mind and memory, increase self-confidence, and even improve your problem-solving skills, Bend Your Brain shouldn’t just be the next book you buy… it has to be the next book you buy.

Click through and learn more about Bend Your Brain: 151 Puzzles, Tips, and Tricks to Blow (and Grow) Your Mind. Trust me, this is one you and your brain are going to love.

Never stop learning!
~ Joi

Bend Your Brain Book Review
Note: I received this book from the Blogging for Books program in exchange for this review. The opinions are entirely my own.

How to Stimulate Your Brain and Strengthen Your Mind

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Turtle

Great Looking Turtle Checking Out Some Corn I Left Out for Squirrels

Mysteriously, Alzheimer’s disease is affecting 4.5 million Americans today.  Researchers are hard at work finding ways to help those who are suffering as well as find ways to prevent more from joining them.

A new batch of research sheds light on some simple ways that we can begin protecting our minds today to avoid problems tomorrow.

  1. Drink more fruit and vegetable juice. Those who drink juice at least three times a week had a 75% lower risk of dementia.  75%!
  2. Sing as you workout. It sounds kind of, forgive the pun, off-beat, but singing while working out boosted brain retention for 70% of the participants in a Japanese study.  Exercise sends blood to the brain, improving memory….and singing, perhaps, simply makes the exercise more enjoyable.
  3. Floss daily. There’s a connection between gum disease and Alzheimer’s.  Bacteria from the mouth may cause chronic inflammation, which could impede blood flow to the brain.
  4. Challenge your mind each day. This one may seem obvious (especially compared to singing while you sweat and flossing), but this is one that the majority of people simply fail to do.  DON’T get comfortable with what you know and what you’re able to do.  To get comfortable is the beginning of the end.  Push yourself each and every day to learn more, do more, and grow more.  Take up new hobbies, read about fresh, new subjects, and brush up on facts you once knew by heart (state capitals, planets, Spanish, the elements, etc).
  5. Be Puzzled. Work crossword puzzles, jumbles, and word finds every day.  What seems like play or doodling is actually stimulating you mind.  Even basic word find puzzles are good for your brain.

Also, bear something else in mind: Don’t keep reading the same things or doing the same types of puzzles over and over again. What challenge is there in repetition?  STRETCH your mind in new ways and constantly throw new things into the mix.  For example, work all the crossword puzzles you want, but occasionally throw in new types of puzzles (Sudoku, Math-related puzzles, Word Jumbles, etc.).  Read about your favorite subject daily – that’s very commendable, but also throw new subjects into the mix as often as possible.  I love reading about animals, birds, and American history.  I try to learn new things about these favorite areas each day.  However, I also frequently throw new subjects into the mix and read about subjects I know very little about.  Turtles were actually a recent fascination – after seeing a particularly large one on a History Channel show.

I’ve read just about everything you could ever hope to find on turtles now and could, if the situation presented itself, carry on a pretty darn good conversation about them.

Did you know that the earliest turtles actually had teeth and they couldn’t retract their heads? Kind of defeated the purpose of being a turtle, didn’t it?

Sometimes I’ll also study something  that I’ve never been interested in – like astronomy or the weather.  After reading about completely new subjects, they often become pretty fascinating to me.  How mentally stimulating do you think that is?!  Try it, I know you’ll benefit from these Self Studies as much as I do.

When we make a list of our personal goals – ways we’d like to improve our lives and strengthen our health – we should most definitely list strengthening our “Mental Fitness” at the top.  Without that, what need would we have for the others on the list?