Continuous Learning

When you learn a new skill or a new piece of information, or get to grips with a new activity, your brain literally grows. It forms new synaptic connections between your neurons. These connections are the key to intelligence, memory and information processing, so the more you have, the better. The key is to learn new things, not just revisit old ones:

1. Reading. Read about current affairs, buy a daily paper, read books on a wide range of topics. This will not only improve your understanding of the world at large, but it will improve your ability to recall relevant information.
2. Interact Socially. Interacting with other people in an intellectual or social context (without alcohol) helps you to maintain and improve your social intelligence.
3. Learn a New Skill. Learn to play the guitar, or how to write fiction, or how to paint. These skills improve your ability to observe and learn from observation.

Puzzles and Games

Playing crossword puzzles and doing other mentally stimulating activities has been shown to be a key determinant in reducing the risk of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease.

4. Play Puzzles. Puzzles, particularly word and memory puzzles, keep your mind active as well as improving your vocabulary and linguistic ability.
5. Use a Brain Training product. The key in choosing the right product is to find one that is challenging and entertaining. Challenge is necessary to keep your mind active, and if it’s fun, it’ll be easier to keep playing it regularly. Beware of simplistic exercises – if you find it easy, it’s unlikely to be beneficial.

Physical Activity

Physical activity has been shown in numerous studies to have substantial mental health benefits. It is known that exercise relieves symptoms of depression and anxiety, and exercise has been shown to improve brain function and may even protect against dementia.

6. Stay Active. If you can, walk or ride a bike instead of taking the car for short trips. Use the stairs instead of the elevator.
7. Take up a Sport. Do gym classes, or go running, or play a ball game. Exercise increases your levels of brain-derived neutrotrophic factor, which helps brain cells survive longer.

Healthy Eating

Healthy eating is important for physical health, but it has been shown to be important for a healthy mind too. Healthy eating can prevent cholesterol from building up and reducing the blood supply to the brain.

8. Eat Plenty of Fruit and Vegetables. Fruit and vegetables contain essential nutrients for healthy brain function. They also contain anti-oxidants which help protect your brain cells from damage.
9. Don’t Eat too Much. Overeating can lead to hypertension which damages the blood vessels in your brain, and can cause diabetes which also lowers brain function dramatically.

These top tips will help to you keep an active and healthy mind, and will help alleviate stress, anxiety and depression too.

Oxford, UK – 30th September 2009

Tiger Leisure Software has released TLS Brain Training, available from http://www.tlsbraintraining.com. This is a full version of the software, available free for a 7-day trial period.

TLS Brain Training is a puzzle-based brain training product, for the Windows PC. The core of TLS Brain Training is a great selection of new and classic puzzles, including jigsaw puzzles, code words, anagrams, word searches, 15-puzzles, as well as a wide-range of high quality maths and memory puzzles. TLS Brain Training allows you to track your improvement over time for every puzzle type. Players can play single puzzles or full workouts as they wish.

TLS Brain training has been developed with an emphasis on quality of execution and content. This means that it consists only of challenging and interesting puzzles, which have real staying power, meaning that they are fun to play over and over again.

At the end of the trial period, users can upgrade to the full version of the software for only $14.95. Tiger Leisure Software will process bug reports as they arise, and every version of the game is fitted with an auto-update feature, meaning that these updates will be applied no matter what stage the user purchases the game at.

Tiger Leisure Software is a UK-based developer of Windows puzzle games, founded in 2006. Its aim is to appeal to puzzle players of all ages, focusing on puzzles with high replay value, which are easy to learn, tough to master and fun to play.

Contact:
Adam Brown
+44 (0) 1865 249 991
adam@tigerleisuresoftware.com
www.tigerleisuresoftware.com

Please DON’T post the answers as comments, because that will spoil it for other people.

6-letter anagrams:

SANKFR
NORTHW
GINNOW
RANSOB
CLINKE

Now, using the 9 letters in bold above, you get a 9-letter anagram:

GROINBROW

Give it a try – don’t worry if you find it hard, maybe you just need some training

All the words in this puzzle were taken from one TLS Brain Training anagrams game. Download it and try it out now. With thousands of words, you’ll never run out of anagrams again!

Oxford, UK – 30^th September 2009

TLS Brain Training public beta, the new product beta from Tiger Leisure Software, has received the 100% clean award from Softpedia.com, and has been certified clear of spyware, adware and viruses by TopShareware.com

TLS Brain Training is a PC-based brain training game. It offers 14 of the best new and classic puzzles, including code words, jigsaw puzzles, anagrams, word search, tilt mazes, maths games, memory games and more. We entertain and challenge players with a mix of exciting new games and proven, well-loved favorites. Unlike its competitors, TLS Brain Training has fun puzzles with real staying power; each is playable many times without becoming tedious or repetitive. With a simple, elegant and content rich interface, it is the ideal product for the brain training market.

Adam Brown, CEO of Tiger Leisure Software, explained the importance of these awards:

“We were getting lots of feedback from users who were reluctant to download our software. I think this is a great pity, because downloadable software offers possibilities that just don’t exist in the online market, in terms of user enjoyment and available features. It’s time we start to rebuild the reputation of downloadable software, and third-party certification schemes like these are critical to doing so. Visitors to our website should feel confident that our software is safe for them to download and use.”

Tiger Leisure Software is a UK-based developer of Windows puzzle games, founded in 2006. Its aim is to appeal to puzzle players of all ages, focusing on puzzles with high replay value, which are easy to learn, tough to master and fun to play.

Contact:
Adam Brown
http://www.tigerleisuresoftware.com

In a tilt-maze, like any maze, you have to get from the start to the target… Unlike any maze, the ball moves in a straight line until it hits a wall, and you have to stop on the target. Sounds simple? It really isn’t!

Get the blue ball from the start to the target...

A bit of playing around, and you should find the correct route – but remember, when you play this puzzle interactively, if you make one mistake, you can’t necessarily go back! Here is a more complicated example:

Get the blue ball to the target...

If you want to play some of these mazes, TLS Brain Training has unlimited tilt mazes – as in it generates new ones every time you play!

Sources: I first became aware of this type of maze from Andrea Gilbert’s excellent Click Mazes site.

If people are suddenly expecting to become more intelligent and creative and better at all mental activities, just by playing a puzzle or game, then I’m sorry to disappoint you. This isn’t going to happen (since we don’t have a scientifically accepted definition of intelligence, it wouldn’t be measurable even if it did). I would, however, point out three areas in which you might expect brain training to offer improvements:

1. General number skills – these are used from day to day for everything from working out which shop gives you the best deal to having some intuition as to which cell phone deal is right for you, or how much tax you owe.
2. Word and language skills – the ability to recall words and to use them in a particular context, or even to understand and recognise a particular word is vital for communication in the digital era.
3. Short-term memory skills – such as remembering the items on a to-do list without writing them down, or remembering what to buy without having a shopping list or personal organiser to tell you.

Now with these modest but important goals in mind, here is my list of 5 reasons why brain training ought to work:

1. You can improve your number skills by doing arithmetic. A big part of working out sums in your head is remembering them. So you don’t need to work out what 7+9 is, because you (hopefully) remember the answer. Clearly any puzzle or game that offers simple number practice is likely to improve your skills in this area. With multiplication, this is particularly important, which is why you learned your times tables in school.
2. You can improve language skills by playing word games. When you come across a word you don’t know, you tend to look it up. But even if you don’t do this, there is a distinction between so-called active and passive vocabulary. Active vocabulary means the words you use every day, and passive vocabulary means the words you know the meaning of, but don’t use. The more you see and interact with a particular word, the more likely you are to use ourselves. So you would expect word games to improve your passive vocabulary, if nothing else.
3. Short term memory skills are to a large extent pre-determined by biology. Very few people, hearing a list of numbers recited quickly, will remember more than about 9 of them (the average is 7). This does not mean that you cannot remember lists of more things that that. The way in which most people do this is to use “tricks”, where the items are associated with something else, or remembered as part of a pattern. Obviously, most tricks which work in a memory game can translate to you remembering a shopping list. Playing a memory game therefore encourages you to get used to methods for remembering things.
4. You often hear people saying things like “the brain is a muscle”, and while I have no real time for that, it seems intuitively plausible to me that keeping your mind active expands or maintains your cognitive abilities. So you would expect that sufficiently challenging games and puzzles would help to keep you sharp.
5. Lastly, and most importantly, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the brain can be trained. Most people call this “learning”, and anyone who ever went to school or even learned how to talk or write has experience with this older, more prosaic form of brain training.

Oxford, UK – 30^th September 2009

Tiger Leisure Software has released a public beta of TLS Brain Training, available from http://www.tlsbraintraining.com. This is a full version of the software, available for an extended 30-day beta period.

TLS Brain Training is a PC-based brain training game. It offers 14 of the best new and classic puzzles, including code words, jigsaw puzzles, anagrams, word search, tilt mazes, maths games, memory games and more. We entertain and challenge players with a mix of exciting new games and proven, well-loved favorites. Unlike its competitors, TLS Brain Training has fun puzzles with real staying power; each is playable many times without becoming tedious or repetitive. With a simple, elegant and content rich interface, it is the ideal product for the brain training market.

At the end of the beta period, users can upgrade to the full version of the software for only $14.95. Tiger Leisure Software will process bug reports as they arise, and every version of the game is fitted with an auto-update feature, meaning that these updates will be applied no matter what stage the user purchases the game at.

———-

Tiger Leisure Software is a UK-based developer of Windows puzzle games, founded in 2006. Its aim is to appeal to puzzle players of all ages, focusing on puzzles with high replay value, which are easy to learn, tough to master and fun to play.

Contact:

Adam Brown

+44 (0) 1865 249 991

adam (at) tigerleisuresoftware.com