Random Review: Bend Your Brain: 151 Puzzles, Tips, and Tricks to Blow (and Grow) Your Mind by Lindsay Gaskins

Bend Your Brain: 151 Puzzles, Tips, and Tricks to Blow (and Grow) Your Mind by Lindsay Gaskins
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Publication Date:  August 19, 2014

 

Format: Paperback
Source: Blogging for Books in exchange for an honest review. Receiving this book in no way effects my opinion of the book

Rating:




 



Goodreads Synopsis: 
Want to get your frontal cortex breaking a sweat? Make your blood pump to your cerebellum? Stretch your occipital lobe to its limits?

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!

 Review: 

Bend Your Brain is a wonderfully fun book of puzzles designed to stretch your mind. It took me a while to write this review but not long to get through the book. The day I received it I brought it to bed with me and challenged my husband to help me solve some of the puzzles to see what the book was like – it became addicting and so much fun. We did the puzzles together and each of us had strengths and weaknesses with the different types of puzzles. The book is broken down into various types of puzzles but also different levels of brain power, so the mind busting and mind blowing levels were pretty extreme and often took a lot longer to complete.

I really enjoyed the word games and I think my husband did better at the association puzzles. We both had the same issue with the book though – the progress was fast and the levels got really tough really quickly. We would have liked for more of the lower level ones to better prepare us for the rest of the levels.

Overall I think this was a wonderful book. I love puzzles as it is and this was a wonderful way to spend an evening (or more). I think that if you are looking for a book to pass the time or a gift book, this would be a wonderful choice. There are puzzles for all types and levels so it is bound to appeal to most readers and puzzle-lovers.