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Ferida Wolff’s Backyard’s Weather Puzzles: A Strange Time of Year Here; Jigsaw Puzzles As Cognitive Enrichment

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Awareness of the natural connection can beautifully enhance our lives

Sunday, February 2,  2020

Weather Puzzles

This has been a strange time of year here, weatherwise. Sometimes the temperature is more like spring or fall and then it zips into extreme cold. Sometimes there is ice on the morning windshield and by afternoon jackets aren’t needed. Snow may be predicted but we haven’t seen a snowstorm yet.
 
One day the wind was so aggressive that it moved things sideways. Another day was so foggy that it was hard to see beyond a few feet. The weather has been puzzling for a while now. It is Ferida's backyard weather puzzleacross the world, causing great concern. I tend to worry about it.
 
On one of the coldest days, I took out a jigsaw puzzle with a weather-pleasant scene and sat down in my warm room to work on it. I found it calming, helping the grasses and birds emerge from the individual pieces, creating the butterflies, and imagining myself in such a warm, inviting place.
 
Being focused on one thing at a time helps to clear the webs of worrisome thoughts and move through our day more peacefully engaged. When I finally had to go out, I was still in a calm place, grateful for the time spent just putting together one puzzle and letting go of another one, at least for a little while.
 
NASA looks at our weather: https://climate.nasa.gov/
 
Puzzle by Marjolein Bastin

©2020 Ferida Wolff for SeniorWomen.com

Editor’s Note:  As  a longtime jigsaw puzzler ourselves, we decided to add the below:

National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine
8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda MD, 20894 USA

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5588550/

Jigsaw Puzzles As Cognitive Enrichment (PACE) – the effect of solving jigsaw puzzles on global visuospatial cognition in adults 50 years of age and older: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial

Patrick Fissler,corresponding author#1,2 Olivia C. Küster,#1,2 Laura S. Loy,1,3 Daria Laptinskaya,1 Martin J. Rosenfelder,1 Christine A. F. von Arnim,2 and Iris-Tatjana Kolassa1

With this study, we aim to evaluate the effect of solving jigsaw puzzles on visuospatial cognition, daily functioning, and psychological outcomes.

Methods

The pre-post test, assessor-blinded study will include 100 cognitively healthy adults 50 years of age or older, who will be randomly assigned to a jigsaw puzzle group or a cognitive health counseling group. Within the 5-week intervention period, participants in the jigsaw puzzle group will engage in 30 days of solving jigsaw puzzles for at least 1 h per day and additionally receive cognitive health counseling. The cognitive health counseling group will receive the same counseling intervention but no jigsaw puzzles. The primary outcome, global visuospatial cognition, will depict the average of the z-standardized performance scores in visuospatial tests of perception, constructional praxis, mental rotation, processing speed, flexibility, working memory, reasoning, and episodic memory. As secondary outcomes, we will assess the eight cognitive abilities, objective and subjective visuospatial daily functioning, psychological well-being, general self-efficacy, and perceived stress. The primary data analysis will be based on mixed-effects models in an intention-to-treat approach.

Discussion

Solving jigsaw puzzles is a low-cost, intrinsically motivating, cognitive leisure activity, which can be executed alone or with others and without the need to operate a digital device. In the case of positive results, these characteristics allow an easy implementation of solving jigsaw puzzles in clinical practice as a way to improve visuospatial functioning. Whether cognitive impairment and loss of independence in everyday functioning might be prevented or delayed in the long run has to be examined in future studies.

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