Just Jennifer

Bend Your Brain: 151 Puzzles, Tips and Tricks to Blow [and Grow] Your Mind (Three Rivers Press, August 2014)

Put together by the team at Marbles® the Brain Store, this book is an amalgamation of five types of puzzles, each designed to unlock a different area of your brain: visual perception, word skills, critical thinking, coordination and memory.  Each section of puzzles is further divided into five categories: mind warming, mind stretching, mind growing, mind busting and finally mind blowing.  Each section begins with a short introduction that includes where in the brain the particular skill is based (word skills, for example are based in the partial lobe), what the skill is (helps with an understanding of language, structure and how to express yourself) what it does (improves vocabulary and stimulates your creativity) and how it works (it’s an association skill that uses multiple types of input from all your lobes).  The puzzles that follow include finding a series of interlocking four-letter words, word finds taken a step further by turning the words into phrases, word scrambles in which all the words once unscrambled relate to an unnamed theme, a trivia word find that will test your knowledge of certain things (seven-letter elements, for example), another chain game, a compass crossword in which the answers not only go south (down) and east (across) but southwest or north, and finally linked word puzzles which require words to be entered using only the letters provided in between like symbols.  If word games aren’t your thing, try coordination, the brain-body connection.  Some puzzles require some recall of knowledge gleaned from everyday life, the media or back to our school years, while others require some thought or clever thinking.  Whichever your strength (or weakness) there is something here for everyone.  This is a book that can be picked up and worked on at random and then set aside, picked up years later.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the Blogging for Books program in exchange for this review.