Puzzle assembling is mostly fun, but did you know how many secret benefits this clever games
has?
You get a new puzzle – what a joy, right? You can’t wait to put them all on the table and start assembling. Every assembler has his own system, what is yours? First you turn all the puzzle pieces facing up or you first sort out the border pieces? Maybe the first task is to get a glass of nice wine to make the assembling even more fun 🙂 Either way, puzzle is out of the bag, just to go through them is so much fun! Sometimes you even find two pieces already connected, what a luck, right?
Real happiness comes when you actually manage to connect the pieces yourself. This happiness is no ordinary feeling and it causes a lot of great changes in our head. When we assemble we use both of our brain hemispheres. The left one analyzes the separate pieces, shapes and colors and the right one is intuitively helping us to connect the dots into a full image. This hemisphere collab is extremely beneficial. When we connect two pieces, the feeling of satisfaction and joy means that the dopamine is being created in our brain – and that is a very good thing.
Science fun fact
Dopamine is a neuron transmitter and plays an important role for the functions of human brain. It helps to control our emotional reactions like happiness, stress or anxiety. It’s also important for creating energy for body functioning. It stimulates the heart, controls the informational flow that goes through our brain, controls movement and allows us to experience feelings of joy, passion and excitement. In case we lack dopamine we can feel depressed, drowsy or suffer from insomnia. Dopamine deficiency causes only trouble, like inability to cope with stress, problems to focus, overall grumpiness, caffeine and sugar cravings. Thanks to puzzle assembling and riddle solving our brain gets the training it needs and the dopamine is naturally created. We are improving our memory, ability to focus and to learn – very important benefits for both kids and adults.
Brain yoga
Since both of our hemispheres are active while assembling, they exchange information and therefore assembling supports logical and creative thinking. This brain yoga even serves as prevention against Alzheimer’s or dementia. And all of this is possible mostly thanks to the dopamine, which is basically a youth elixir for our brain. Traditional yoga merges mindful movement and meditation. Puzzle is the very same thing for our brain. You must know the feeling when you are so into assembling that you don’t even know what time is it, nor you care that you need to wake up early the next morning but you have to find one more piece?
Assembling puzzle is an active brain meditation. We let go of all the distractions and focus on what we are doing right now. We don’t think about work or tasks. Assembling allows us to dive in to the present moment and enjoy the real joy in every small puzzle piece. One of the reasons why we experience such a relax euphoria while assembling is the hemisphere collaboration. This internal brain communication allows us to get from the beta state – awake mind, to alfa state – state of mind similar to dreaming. Alfa state is the place where we are able to enter our subconscious. Even though it may seem unbelievable and complicated, it’s a real deal. Puzzle assembling naturally causes this state of creative and focused meditation.
To play and have fun is extremely important both for kids and adults. And fun game that will make us smarter, internally younger and relaxed is really worth it. Puzzles create amazing space for an active brain relax full of incredible benefits.