Book excerpt: 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!