![]() “You learn from past history and experience and look at patterns to help predict what will happen in the future.”īerkowitz points to myriad other puzzle-solving skills that can be applied in everyday life. Hsiung confirms that puzzles can indeed help with developing problem-solving skills by stimulating the brain’s frontal lobe, which is used to make decisions. “We can’t stand things that are random.”ĭr. “Humans are a pattern seeking species,” Dr. Puzzles also help you makes sense of patterns and thus make sense of the world around us. “We say in statistics if there is only one way to interpret the data then it’s probably wrong.” “If you stop looking for new possibilities, you become rigid in your thinking.”ĭoing puzzles, he says, helps you to step back and take a fresh look at the problem and ways of viewing it in the context of the situation. “Business at its core is about problem solving,” Dr. Berkowitz has also taught a course at Sauder for executives that focuses on puzzles and problem-solving for business decision-making. Now a statistics lecturer at UBC’s Sauder School of Business, Dr. Statistician Jonathan Berkowitz got hooked on Scrabble as a kid and still loves puzzles so much that he wrote a book on the benefits of puzzles. “You have to do a wide variety of things to make your whole brain connected,” he says. Even physical exercise can boost your mental health. You can build connections in your brain by learning a musical instrument, taking a history class, or speaking a new language. “Creative pursuits are also very stimulating to the brain,” Dr. Or think outside the puzzle boxes and cultivate a new skill. So if the Sunday New York Times crossword is frustratingly difficult, try the easier Monday version instead, and go from there. The key is to find something new that challenges you at a level that feels rewarding and builds progression. “Prevention is better than treatment for the next generation,” he says. It can also be frustrating for people to try to develop new skills at that point. Once dementia has set in, research shows that stimulating the brain is not nearly as effective in stopping decline. Hsiung notes that young people, not just those in midlife, can benefit from continually developing a wide range of skills. “Intelligence,” he adds, “is faster brain processing with a wider knowledge base.” Prevention starts youngĭr. You store knowledge and then can retrieve that knowledge faster.” “The information travels from one part of the brain to another and the processing of the information gets faster. ![]() “The more you stimulate it, the more efficient your brain becomes,” says Dr. That’s why it’s important to train your brain in many different ways, which can then work together. A jigsaw puzzle or three-dimensional puzzle could help your visual recognition and hand-eye coordination but it won’t help your vocabulary. Similarly, a card-matching game might improve your short-term memory but won’t make your speech any better. So while Wordle might strengthen the brain area that controls spelling, it won’t do much to stimulate the arithmetic domain. ![]() “You can train one domain and that domain gets better, but that doesn’t translate to another function,” he explains. “The more you stimulate it, the more efficient your brain becomes.” In addition to language, for example, there’s short term memory, mathematical skills and eye-hand coordination, among others. But there are many different “domains”, or brain functions, that you can stimulate. He says research shows that stimulating the brain by doing mental exercises like puzzles can indeed help prevent Alzheimer’s disease and dementia in people who haven’t yet shown significant cognitive decline. Hsiung, who is also an associate professor in UBC Faculty of Medicine’s Division of Neurology, studies the brain, memory loss, Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia. That helps to ward off diseases.” Your brain on puzzlesĭr. “The more types of puzzles you solve, the more brain exercises you do, you form new synapses, which are the connections between brain cells. That’s because certain puzzles train certain parts of your brain-the part that controls language and spelling, for example, when you play a word puzzle-rather than the brain as a whole. Don’t do just one type,” advises neurologist Robin Hsiung of UBC’s Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health. “If your goal is to stay mentally sharp, you should do a lot of different type of puzzles. But if you’re getting a bit weary of guessing five-letter words, it might be time to try something new. If you’ve discovered the joy of Wordle, you’ll be glad to know that word games can help keep you mentally sharp.
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