The Health Benefits of Playing with Wooden Jigsaw Puzzles

Research has shown for some time that playing with jigsaw puzzles helps a great deal in keeping the brain active, preserving alertness, and ensuring good mental health. While we are aware that one needs to exercise the body to maintain its fitness, we should also actively engage our minds. Jigsaw puzzles challenge our mental faculties and therefore, keep minds healthy and brains active.

The production of dopamine, a chemical in the brain that improves memory and learning, is encouraged when someone assembles a jigsaw puzzle. The left and right brain are engaged simultaneously by the activity, which allows one to move from a Beta state (conscious mind) to an Alpha (unconscious or dreaming) state. This engagement of the brain's hemispheres builds brain cells, which increase the ability to learn. Using meditation by accessing the unconscious, often employed by Olympic athletes in conjunction with visualization, to increase performance. Combining this powerful and creative state of mind with affirmations and positive imagery results in positive transformation at the deepest level.

An article published in USA Today on March 5, 2001 cited that adults engaging in intellectual activities, such as playing with jigsaw puzzles, are 2.5 times less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease. These findings, which resulted from a study conducted by Dr. Robert P. Friedland (an associate professor of neurology at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and member of the medical staff at University Hospitals of Cleveland) believes that the effect of doing intellectual activities between the ages of 20 to 60 can deter the onset of the disease. While intellectual stimulation in early and middle adulthood does not definitively protect against Alzheimer's in late adulthood, he stated that healthier brain cells are better able to control and decelerate the Alzheimer's process.

Dr. Zaven Khachaturian, senior medical advisor to the Alzheimer's Association, concurred the importance of this study as it supported additional research that showed that education and intellectually demanding professions can delay the onset of Alzheimer's. Khachaturian believes that although there is no evidence proving that intellectual stimulation may alter the disease's course, it can delay the onset of the disease and give more years of rational life to those who eventually develop Alzheimer's.

In 1906, Dr. Alzheimer noticed changes in the brain tissue of a women who had died from an unusual mental illness. The patient's symptoms, which included language problems, unpredictable behavior and memory loss, were substantiated by abnormal clumps or amyloid plaques and tangled bundles of fibers (neurofibrillary tangles) found in her brain.

Alzheimer's disease, a fatal brain-destroying disorder that is generally diagnosed after the age of 60, progressively devastates memory and eventually, the ability to care for oneself. Although no cure has been found, the disease is caused by the development of protein-based plaques in the brain, which destroy brain cells (or neurons). It is anticipated that by 2050 about one in 10 people aged 65 or older will be diagnosed with Alzheimer's as well as half of those over the age of 85.

While estimates vary, experts suggest that Alzheimer's is the most common cause of dementia - the loss of cognitive functioning (thinking, reasoning and remembering) - interfering with one's daily activities and life. Currently, as many as 5.1 Americans have been diagnosed with this disease, which was named after Dr. Alois Alzheimer.