I’ve been trying the puzzles in BEND YOUR BRAIN the last few days, and my brain hurts. That’s a good thing! Thanks to the variety of included puzzles, I can feel myself thinking differently. Sounds weird, but it’s true. In recent books like THE ORGANIZED MIND or HOW WE LEARN, we learn to pick up associations and patterns and to minimize distractions: this book helps us do that. Doing these puzzles over the weekend has helped my work performance today.
Variety is king. A lot of these types of puzzles I’ve seen before: mazes, Sudoku, and crosswords, etc. Then they change the method (and madness) on several of these: random letters instead of numbers in Sudoku, mazes covering front-and-back pages, and several hundred dot-to-dots. Then!—they add puzzles I’ve never seen before such as linking words through various shapes, strategizing the placement of battleships, and making compound words from pictures.
There are various levels of intensity, but some of the “mind blowing” puzzles may seem easier than the “warming up” puzzles. Depends on the person, I suppose.
All that is not without its faults. Sometimes I can’t tell what something is by its black & white picture (is that a piece of gum or sandpaper?). They ask me to identify a corporate logo I’ve never seen before. The dot-to-dots run down into the crease of the book. They ask me to recall the date the original TWILIGHT book was released (really?!?). They ask me to know the year the Starz movie channel was founded (again, really?!?). And they want me to identify celebrities by the photos of their mouths (fill-in-the-blank nonetheless).
Overall the good outweighs the bad or frustrating. I like this book so much that I want more! There are a lot of challenging and fun puzzles that I’ll continue to look forward to completing.
Get it at Amazon
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