Puzzles: How To Use Them To Improve Brain Performance? - Three illustrations: the first shows a cross-word-like puzzle. The second illustration shows six sheets of A4 paper. And the third illustration shows a glass of wine on top of a sheet of A4 paper.

I write about puzzles because I find them engaging, challenging, and fun to solve. And I am not alone; my readers (you!) are the proof for this. Most recently, I started researching the science behind puzzles.

One specific area that got me deeply fascinated was the intersection between neuroscience and puzzles. The result is a wealth of information (formal and informal) on how you could use puzzles to improve your long-term brain performance.

In this essay, I will be going over three examples of how you could improve brain performance of different areas of your brain. To illustrate each example, I will be posing a fun puzzle each time (get ready for some action). Finally, I will be discussing further research and work I plan to do in this direction that will be benefiting you as well.

Without any further ado, let us begin.

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Language

I’ll start with a puzzle that challenges your verbal reasoning. After you solve the puzzle, I will briefly describe the effect such puzzles have on your brain.

Puzzles: How To Use Them To Improve Brain Performance? — An image showing a row of 6 slots, out of which five are empty. The fifth slot (second from the right) has the letter ‘C’ written in its upper half and the letter ‘G’ written in its lower half.
Illustrative art created by the author

Above, you can see a puzzle box with six slots. All slots are empty except the last one from the right. Your challenge is to come up with one English word that uses ‘C’ and another English word that uses ‘G’ in the fifth slot. All other letters of both the words must be the same.

Do you think you can solve this puzzle?

Spoiler Alert

In case you don’t have the time or have already solved this puzzle on your own, you can check the solution to the puzzle here.

What is the Point of Verbal Puzzles?

If you are a person who fares well with abstract thinking or if you think primarily in words rather than images, this puzzle should have been straight forward for you. If you are more of an imaginative person with your reasoning, worry not.

What verbal puzzles do is activate the language-mediating hemisphere of your brain. For most people, this is the left hemisphere. If you are not used to activating this part of your brain to think regularly, it is normal to find such puzzles challenging.

The good news is that with enough practice, you could switch on the language-mediating part of your brain at will. Now that we have covered this part, let us move on to another part of the brain.

Space

Our next puzzle tests your spatial reasoning skills. This one is going to get a bit physical. Imagine 6 sheets of A4 paper. Lay them flat on a table (or equivalent) such that each sheet overlaps exactly one other sheet and slides under exactly one other sheet.

Puzzles: How To Use Them To Improve Brain Performance? — An illustration showing 6 sheets of A4 paper. Three sheets are lined up as a row on the top, and another three sheets are lined up as a row at the bottom.
Illustrative art created by the author

If you find this puzzle too difficult to solve using imagination alone, you can go physically fetch 6 sheets of A4 paper and give it a try.

Spoiler Alert

In case you don’t have the time or have already solved this puzzle on your own, you can check the solution to the puzzle here.

What is the Point of Spatial Puzzles?

Personally, language puzzles are my strong point and spatial puzzles are my weak point. I was able to come up with a solution idea via my imagination — I knew that it had to be a loop, and the picture of a circle popped up in my head. But in order to test whether my idea worked, I had to arrange physical sheets.

The challenge with this puzzle is that no amount of verbal reasoning helps you solve it. For a language type (like me), it’s the worst nightmare. Without spatially moving sheets of paper in your mind, it is impossible to solve it.

Such puzzles challenge the parietal lobes of your brain. Like all of the puzzles you will get to solve as part of this essay, your brain benefits not from getting the right answer but from activating and engaging these parts (in this case, the parietal lobes).

Imagine that you are lost on your way to some place and don’t have access to GPS or a map. You stop to ask for directions, and the person guiding you offers you two options:

1. Get verbal directions — Take the first left, drive two kilometres straight, then turn right


2. Get the route highlighted on a map that the person offers you.

Which option would you choose? If you go for the first option, you are a verbal thinker and not a visual thinker. If you go for the second option, it is the other way around.

Spatial puzzles are designed to help verbal thinkers get better at spatial reasoning and language puzzles are designed to help visual thinkers get better at verbal reasoning. Now that we have covered this, let us move on to a more complex part of the brain.

Creativity

You are given a glass of wine and a sheet of A4 paper. Your challenge is to balance the glass of wine at least 10 centimetres above the ground/table using just the sheet of paper. How would you solve this?

Puzzles: How To Use Them To Improve Brain Performance? — An illustration showing a wine glass placed on top of a sheet of A4 paper. The wine glass appears to be filled with wine.
Illustrative art created by the author

Spoiler Alert

In case you don’t have the time or have already solved this puzzle on your own, you can check the solution to the puzzle here.

What is the Point of Creativity Puzzles?

In 1931, experimental psychologist Charles Spearman showed that creativity activates and coordinates a widespread system of brain circuits that do not typically work together.

The example puzzle above requires most people to think out of the box. If you belong to ‘most people’, you would have to think about paper in a way that you normally do not.

Creativity puzzles challenge the frontal and anterior temporal lobes of the brain (typically) on the right hemisphere. The neural connections relating to the various pieces of the puzzle are only weakly connected. But by practising out-of-the-box thinking, you are strengthening your brain-creativity-muscles (metaphorically).

I personally solved this puzzle in a matter of seconds, because I did not have to think out of the box. I have experience in designing carbon fibre components for formula racing cars. So, this was an intuitive puzzle for me. This is why I said this puzzle applies for ‘most people’. But don’t worry, everybody has a limited knowledge space, and consequently, an ‘out-of-the-box’ space as well.

Closing Comments

While researching this fascinating topic, I happened to come across the name Ryuta Kawashima (among many others). This name was familiar to me, and it took a moment to register.

Of course! It is the Japanese neuroscientist behind the popular Nintendo game series: Brain Age. I used to play this game as a child and had to dig out my old Nintendo Dsi XL to relive some of the nostalgia.

Going forward, I will try to research more about this field and offer puzzles that are targeted at improving the performance of specific brain areas. As a reader, you’d benefit more not just by solving a puzzle, but also by learning which part of your brain you are exercising when you tackle the puzzle.

The best part about puzzles is that they are designed to be fun. The more you enjoy exercising your brain, the better your brain gets at problem-solving!

References and Credit: Richard Restak and Scott Kim.

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