How Jigsaw Puzzles Help Your Brain
“I’m sorry. What’s your name again?”
Prescription: A puzzle a day may help keep brain fog away. Interesting enough, your brain actually likes the way you think when working on a jigsaw puzzle. There’s proof.
Any mental workout that exercises your brain improves your thought processes. Puzzles fit nicely into this category. When you’re working on a puzzle lots of good things happen. Jigsaw puzzle assembly exercises both your left side, analytic, linear and right side, the creative side of your mind.
Bill Gates tries to work on a puzzle a day, that he claims improves his problem-solving skills. He may have read that if you spend 25 minutes a day on a jigsaw puzzle, this activity can boost your IQ by 4 points according to a University of Michigan study on the subject, conducted by Susanne Jäggi and Martin Buschkuehl.
When one of the icons of tech looks forward to turning away from screens with a jigsaw puzzle, we may want to follow his lead. A jigsaw puzzle is real, and it takes more than one thumb to accomplish the satisfaction of its completion, with no need for a battery charge to get there.
Need more proof about how good puzzling can be?
Jigsaw puzzles improve your short-term memory. You may be able to remember someone’s name more easily if you puzzle frequently. Doing a puzzle regularly has been proven to increase your mental speed and memory.
When you work on a puzzle, you’re thinking about the big picture, while dealing with all those small pieces spread all over the place. Good for you. Your brain’s ability to discern visual-spatial relationships is being leveraged. Practically speaking, exercising this kind of reasoning helps when you’re parking a car, reading a GPS, learning dance steps and a whole bunch of other useful skills.
Jigsaw puzzles are notorious as stress relievers. When you’re concentrating on one action for a long period of time, everyday stress seems to melt away. And all that peace and tranquility improves your blood pressure and heart rate. Why not tell your physician all your good numbers may be a combination of her practice, and yours.
Puzzles present an opportunity to gather a family together. Everybody gets a piece of the action, and the glue that holds the family together is found in a common goal that produces a beautiful outcome. On the other side of the coin, puzzles can give you a perfect excuse to ask for some alone time, while you tackle a mind-bending puzzle in peaceful reverie as the too-busy world fades from awareness.
There are more wonderful benefits to working on a complex puzzle, but, I have to go now, I’m working on a particularly challenging puzzle and I need some alone time to figure it out.
1. Jäggi, Susanne M. and Buschkuehl, Martin, Surprising Benefits Of Puzzles for our Brain, Accessed 7/12/22, https://cubelelo..com