Nancy Linde - 417 More Games, Puzzles & Trivia Challenges Specially Designed to Keep Your Brain Young

Nancy Linde Introduction by Philip D. Harvey, PhD workman publishing, new york William Wordsworth once wrote that the best portion of a good persons life is not the big events but those little nameless, unremembered acts of kindness. This book is dedicated to all of the good people who are spending the best portion of their lives lovingly looking after our senior citizens at home, in senior communities, assisted living and independent living residences, in nursing homes, hospitals, senior centers, senior day care facilities, and other senior- serving organizations. Thank you for all you do. Philip D. Harvey, PhD
Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Director of the Division of Psychology, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine T hose of us who enjoyed 399 Games, Puzzles & Trivia Challenges Specially Designed to Keep Your Brain Young are delighted that Nancy Linde has been busy making more games and puzzles.

This new volume is packed with a rich mix of creative challenges that are just as fun to solve and as stimulating for your brain as her first book was. As I thought about how to revise this introduction to brain science for the new edition, I realized the best news is that current science is still showing us that exercising your brain to think in new and challenging ways continues to be a great way to maintain your cognitive edge. And so what follows is an updated reminder for new readers as well as veterans of the previous book on how your brain works and how you can keep it in good working order, no matter what your age is. Like its predecessor, this book is, first and foremost, a book of gamesfun and engaging trivia quizzes, brainteasers, puzzles, and word games. If you bought this book because you love high-quality games, feel free to just skip this introduction, turn to page 1, and start playing. But if you are also a person who wants to improve your memory and sharpen your mind, read on.

Because this is not just a book of games, it is also a rigorous exercise workout to keep your brain in tip-top shape. Games are beneficial to us in lots of ways. They can be a fun way to spend time with the people we love. They promote social interaction. Theyre also an absorbing way to spend our solitary time. They challenge us intellectually, and they are rich in new learning opportunities.

But what science has also shown us over the last two decades is that playing the right kinds of games can actually improve the health of your brain. In the same way that regular physical exercise makes your heart stronger and your body more limber, a daily dose of games can make your brain function better. How is this possible? The very act of thinking in novel ways triggers a physical reaction in the braina cascade of events, called neurogenesis, in which proteins and enzymes and stem cells all combine to grow new brain cells that rejuvenate your brain and help it to work better and more efficiently. You will find that playing these games will not only make you a better game player, but youll feel better and more cognitively with it in general. Our ideas about exercise, for the brain and the body, have evolved a lot since the days when the brain was viewed as fixed and unchangeable. Back in the 1950s, people over the age of forty were discouraged from exercising because it might cause a heart attack.

As recently as the mid-1970s, most scientists believed that the number of brain cells was set early in your lifearound age twelveand only decreased after that point. This belief led to the conclusion that the mental functions of the brain were also fixed and destined to change only for the worse as aging occurred and brain cells were lost. Today, we know this is not the case. The brain is arguably the most flexible organ in the body, able to constantly adapt, repair, and improve throughout our lifespan. If the brain is injured, by a stroke or tumor for example, it can generate new cells and repair itself. But it doesnt require injury for new cells to form.

The brain can also generate new interconnections in response to its environment. Unlike your height or hat size, you can make your brain change in volume and increase in efficiency by engaging in certain activitiesincluding mentally challenging games and puzzles. Of course, the opposite can also happen. The concept of use it or lose it has been applied for years to physical fitness, but it applies to brain fitness as well. People who are mentally active in their later years (playing games, doing crossword puzzles, learning a language, etc.) are known from clinical research to be more mentally sharp, cognitively agile, and to have better memory functions. The good news is that if youve let your brain go flabby, you can reverse the changes.

In the same way that physical exercise postpones and reduces loss of muscle mass and increases physical flexibility, mental exercise sharpens memory, concentration, and mental flexibility. A word of caution is necessary here. Games are just one part of a healthy lifestyle for a healthy brain. Nothing beats the basics that include eating properly, getting enough sleep, getting some physical exercise every day... you know the drill. For an overview of how it works, lets take a very abbreviated tour of the brain, the most complicated part of any living organism on earth, which is organized for conceptual convenience into several large regions called lobes. For an overview of how it works, lets take a very abbreviated tour of the brain, the most complicated part of any living organism on earth, which is organized for conceptual convenience into several large regions called lobes.

There is clear evidence from evolutionary biology that the regions of the human brain have developed in response to evolution. The earliest animal brains in, for example, worms or snails, are not much more than brain stems, where the most basic functions of the body are located: sensing pain, temperature, crude touch, sleep, and so forth. Throughout the process of evolution, the brain has grown larger, added mass, and become capable of more complex functions. The parts of the human brain that are higher and located toward the front and sides of the cerebral cortex are generally more advanced, more recent in their origin, and define more human qualities. The frontal lobes (one on the right, one on the left) are the origin of all that is intrinsically human, including problem solving, the regulation of emotion, and the ability to develop plans and strategies. The frontal lobes are also critical to the most human of all abilitieslanguage and abstraction, including the capacity to create symbolic representations such as words, letters, and numbers.

These functions are more highly developed in humans than in any other species. The temporal lobes are the home of multiple forms of memory, as well as auditory processingand the functions are a bit different on each side of the brain. On the left side, the temporal lobes code and store verbal information for later recall; on the right side, they store similar spatial memories. The parietal lobes are primarily responsible for spatial information, including cognitive skills such as figuring out routes, organizing complex visual materials, or putting together a puzzle. The occipital lobes, located at the back of the brain, process visual information. They perform basic perceptual processes such as stimulus detection and maintenance of visual perceptual processing.