Chiryoku = Intellectual Power.

Compared to the West, people in Japan live longer, healthier lives and at the heart of their culture – and part of their daily routine – are brain-training puzzles.

The square-box puzzles here, familiar to millions in Japan, are a workout for your mind.

Test and strengthen your mental agility, concentration, numerical skills, powers of reasoning, observation and creative thinking.

Enjoy working through puzzles that will take you from total beginner to master mind and help keep your brain healthy for years to come.

* How do generals - and business strategists - outwit their opponents? * Where do designers and artists get their inspirations from? * How can all of us 'pump up the originality' and steer our thinking off the standard, well-worn tracks? Everyone, as the French philosopher Rene Descartes pointed out long ago, thinks. That's the easy bit. The harder part, and what this book is really about, is how to make your thinking original and effective. And here the problem is that too often we don't really engage the gears of our brain, don't really look at issues in an original or active way, we just respond. Like computers, inputs are processed according to established rules and outputs are thus largely predetermined. Yet that's not what makes us human and that's not where the big prizes in life are to be found. In the third millennium, we need to think a bit more - not less! And so the focus in this book is on practical suggestions about ways to think better... on thinking strategies that each have their own style, applications and benefits.