Building Mental Muscle.

Building Mental Muscle

David Gamon, PhD, and Allen D. Bragdon

Allen D. Bragdon Publishers, Inc.

252 Great Western Road, South Yarmouth, MA 02664

www.brainwaves.com

ISBN 0916410625 $14.95 320 pp.

As with your reading and studying of Learn Faster and Remember More, you will glean much from Building Mental Muscle: Conditioning Exercises for the Six Intelligence Zones defined as Executive and Social, Memory, Emotional, Language, Math, and Spatial. Gamon and Bragdon not only have ferreted out from recent research how the six zones of practical intelligence work, but also these authors have devised exercises "to stimulate the cells in the different brain zones" to maintain cellular activity and to keep all "cognitive zones" in tiptop shape (p. 8). Just as Leonardo da Vinci so aptly said in the 16th century, "Just as iron rusts from disuse, even so does inaction spoil the intellect," Learn Faster & Remember More and Building Mental Muscle make it amply clear that the "use it or lose it" concept is fully at work where the brain and mind are concerned.

In fact, the authors explain that excellent attention to each new learning experience fosters the ability to learn even more. The authors point to the crucial importance of physical exercise, as well as mental exercise, in maintaining the optimum health of the brain. They also discuss how emotion is tied to learning, to retention of information, and to the health of our brain cells and even further to the vitality of our immune systems. Fact after fact will exercise your learning muscles. From their report of Paul Ekman's research, one can even predict that some pharmaceutical companies that earn millions from the sales of antidepressant drugs probably would be happier if other reviewers and I did not help you to find this book. Not everyone will be excited by this book, but those who are enchanted with reading and thrilled with learning will be.

You will return again and again to this well-researched text, to its exercises, self-tests, logic puzzles, drawings, illustrations, and cartoons to refresh your memory and to build mental muscle. You will want to share the information that you learn with those dearest to you, who love learning and want to nurture not only a healthy body but also a healthy, active mind and spirit.

In future editions of both books, the editor can eliminate the inadvertent use of hyphens in compound adjectives beginning with an adverb and ending in -ly. The designer can add the price, readable to the average reader, to the bar code of Building Mental Muscle, and the authors can add an index to make this book an even more useful reference tool for avid readers.

Linda Davis Kyle, Reviewer

www.writersfriend.com