... does doing crosswords, Sudoku, logic puzzles, visual conundrums, and the like diminish the ravaging effects on mental skills by the process of aging? Does puzzle solving enhance cognition generally? I became interested in these questions after working with brain-damaged children in Italy in the mid-1980s (with results published in my book Cervello, lingua, ed educazione [Brain, Language, and Education], 1988). Here's what I did. If a child was assessed as having a weak visual symbol memory, impairing how she or he spelled words or read them, I would prepare appropriate puzzle material, such as jumbled letters that the child would unscramble to construct words. If the word were "tiger" I would give the child the jumbled form "gerti" and a picture of a tiger. What surprised me was how quickly the children improved in their writing and reading skills. However, I had no real explanation for the improvement. We know so little about the connection between brain activities and learning processes that the outcomes I was able to produce may indicate nothing more than a "co-occurrence" between an input and a brain activity, not a "correlation" between the two. Nevertheless, from that experience, it is my cautious opinion that puzzles are beneficial to brain activity and I will attempt to explain here why I believe this is so.
Consider a simple riddle such as: "What is yours yet others use more than you do?" The riddle stumps many people because it cannot be "thought out" through straightforward "logic." The solver has to think outside the puzzle content itself and use knowledge of language, experience, and other "external mental activities" to solve it. The answer is: "Your name." Once the answer is understood, memory for it remains much more permanent because it is unexpected. The psychologists Sternberg and Davidson argued, as far back as 1982 (Psychology Today, Volume 16, pp. 37-44), that solving puzzles entails the ability to compare hidden information in a puzzle with information already in memory, and, more importantly, the ability to combine the information to form novel information and ideas. The thinking involved in solving puzzles can thus be characterized as a blend of imaginative association and memory. It is this blend, I would claim, that leads us to literally see the pattern or twist that a puzzle conceals. It is a kind of "clairvoyance" that typically provokes an Aha! effect.
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