Jigsaw Puzzles Keep Your Over 50 Brain Young and Engaged!

Did you know? Jigsaw puzzles help you exercise both the right and left side of the brain. Working a jigsaw puzzle helps keep your brain young!
Your left brain thinks logically and follows sequence while the right brain is creative, intuitive and emotional. When working a jigsaw puzzle, you harness both sides of the brain.
Jigsaw puzzles engage the brain to retain information on shapes and colors in order to choose pieces that will fit together properly.This hunt for pieces requires your brain to memorize what each piece looks like or should look like and what kinds of pieces you are searching for in order to complete the picture. Doing this repeatedly reinforces short-term memory.
This engaging activity:

1. Works to exercise the brain cells and thereby activates them and increases their efficiency and capacity.
2. Makes you alert, increases concentration, and expands creativity.
3. Helps you practice visualization because you are constantly looking at the images.
4. Affects your physical health by lowering your breath rate and reducing heart rate and blood pressure.
5. Builds up a base of useful individual skills.
6. Transfers individual skills to other situations where they can be applied to solve new problems.

Interesting facts about jigsaw puzzles!They were first created by an English mapmaker by the name of John Spilsbury in the late 1760’s. He made a puzzle by gluing a map of the world on a piece of wood and cut out the countries. Children would put the pieces together to learn to identify individual countries and their relation to one another. This was much like our puzzles of the United States that we all worked on when we were growing up.
Thus, jigsaw puzzles were originally invented for education instead of entertainment. Jigsaw puzzles are now loved by people of all ages. Jigsaw puzzles became a form of daily amusement and activity for adults in the early 1900’s. However, they were quite expensive ($5 for a 500-piece puzzle in 1908). By the time of the Great Depression in the early 1930’s, they became more reasonable in price. In fact, 10 million puzzles were sold per week during this time in history. This was an escape from the troubles of the Depression years.