A crossword puzzle devotee’s bonanza: a personal three-month mind-training program, with 182 performance tips and puzzles to increase memory, math, and language dexterity.

“Together, the exercises and the performance tips will help you in three, quite different, ways. First, they will make you more effectively aware that you can actually control much of what goes on in your brain. You can improve the hand you were dealt. Second, they will teach you strategies for seeing problems in ways that suggest solutions. The different puzzle formats can be applied to real-world problems. Third, you will be growing stronger brain cells. Yes, when you make cells work they will physically grow new connectors, called dendrites and axons, that allow them to pass along signals from cell to cell. Like anything else, the more resources you can bring to bear on a problem, the more likely you are to find a good solution.”

“When anything goes wrong with the brain, the first system affected is memory. Any fluctuation in mental state, such as depression, anxiety, or stress, will have a negative impact on the brain’s memory system. Following a brain injury, memory is almost always the first thing that goes. Damage to the parietal and temporal parts on the left side of the brain is most likely to affect language memory since the left hemisphere specializes in language, verbal, and analytic processes. The right hemisphere specializes in spatial, facial, more Gestalt processes; damage to this side is more likely to affect spatial reasoning and spatial memory.”   
— Brain-Building Games