Building Mental Muscle: Conditioning Exercises for the Six Intelligence Zones

This text uses scientific discovery to reveal how to can maximize on the extraordinary power of the human mind. Why does depression destroy memory faster than age? How can changing your facial expression actually change your mood? Why is laughter so beneficial? How does men and women's brain function differ? Why are women less likely to suffer permanent language loss from the effects of a stroke? How can nicotine benefit the brain? "Building Mental Muscle" explains the complexities in the brain in a straight-forward manner, aided by illustrations and tests, detailing how the brain processes new information, how it stores data and how it can trick us. The authors have set conditioning exercises to help sharpen up the six zones of intelligence - memory; executive/social; mathematical; language; emotional response; and spatial visualization.

Building Mental Muscle is one of the most stimulating books ever written about how the brain works and how you can maintain, even increase, your own mental ability. It will help you develop skills in six important areas:

* Memory * Emotions * Language * Math * Visualization * Executive Planning & Social Interaction

The authors have distilled the latest findings in brain research into fascinating short reports accessible to all readers, adding exercises and self-tests designed to stimulate the cells in different brain zones. A skill used in one domain can cross over into another: For example, when you learn the pattern of number intervals in mathematics, you may perceive a pattern of musical intervals for the first time, and thus enjoy music even more. The exercises and puzzles are intriguing challenges; the self-tests offer many opportunities to rate your social intelligence, take your personality inventory, and gauge working memory.

For anyone interested in self-improvement and in how the brain really works, Building Mental Muscle is essential reading.

Some of the research findings in Building Mental Muscle include:

* The simple lifestyle changes that can boost the rate at which your brain grows neurons to keep your memory sharp
* Ways to trick your emotional brain into storing new information permanently and how to retrieve it from memory when needed
* How women's and men's brains process information differently
* How brains respond to stress, solve problems, recognize faces, and handle fear
* The discovery of a hitherto unknown class of receptor cells in your eyes that your brain uses to set its own internal clock
* How to change your mood without drugs or therapy
* What you can do to combat or even reverse the gradual decline of cognitive skills as you age

Your doctor may not have read about some of the research findings in this book.

Allen D. Bragdon, the founder of the Brainwaves Center, is the founding editor of Games magazine and former editor of the New York Times "Playspace" puzzle column syndicated internationally in the 1980s. He lives on Cape Cod. David Gamon, Ph.D., holds advanced degrees in the cognitive sciences from the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in Oakland, California.