THE SOLUTION WE SEEK
WHY SOLVING PUZZLES FEELS SO SATISFYING , ESPECIALLY IN A QUARANTINE
For many long minutes, the orange glazed doughnut wouldn’ t come together. It wasn’t a real doughnut, but a jigsaw puzzle on my kitchen table, and no matter how I configured the pieces, they refused to connect. Then — aha! — I saw the solution. I rearranged once again, and the doughnut took shape. What a rush!
During these days of quarantine, solving things — whether jigsaw puzzles, crosswords, sudokus or murder mysteries — is one of the ways many of us are amusing and pleasing ourselves. Why? Here, we explore the aha!
THAT EUREKA MOMENT
Moments of insight — the ones that make you cry out ( mentally, if not verbally) — occur when new ideas suddenly emerge into your awareness. ( Step- by- step analytical thinking uses deliberate thought.) An instant ago, you didn’t know the solution to a problem. A flash-second later, you do.
“This is a moment that triggers a lot of excitement. But why do we need so much drama?” asks Carola Salvi, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. Having an insight involves the brain’s reward system, “the same system that responds to food and to other basic pleasures.”
A recent study out of Philadelphia’s Drexel University had 30 students solve anagrams while researchers recorded their brain activity. Very soon after activity in the right middle frontal gyrus, located near the forehead, indicated a moment of insight, activity then occurred in the orbitofrontal cortex, above the eye, which is responsible for processing rewards. Co-author Yongtaek Oh, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the university’s Creativity Research Lab, says, “Generally, such activity is associated with ‘wanting’ and ‘ liking.’”
A SOURCE OF REWARDS, MORE OR LESS
But not everyone activated the rewards region equally. Some are naturally more sensitive to rewards than others. If you’re highly sensitive to rewards, your enjoyment of the aha! may be greater. If not, your enjoyment seems more muted.
“There are certain personality types that are very, very reward-oriented,” says Salvi, who was not involved in this study. “This depends on the balance of the neurotransmitter called dopamine in the brain.”
These differences also explain why some people gorge on too much food, take drugs or gamble: These experiences trigger the same system. So could puzzling and other insight- inducing home activities also be addictive? Oh says it’s too soon to know. The brief buzz creates other benefits. “We also think that it motivates people and gives you energy for wanting to actually do that idea that came to your mind,” says Salvi. While placing a jigsaw puzzle piece doesn’t take much oomph, launching into a new artistic endeavour or putting an engineering design into action does. That rush of pleasure could help facilitate this.
Is it a good idea to move ahead with a solution that popped out of nowhere? Salvi says yes. She was first author on a study that involved more than 225 participants at universities in the U.S. and Italy who experienced moments of insight while doing various puzzles. She says 92 per cent of the time we have an insight, “we’re likely to be correct.”
A GIANT STEP FOR HUMANKIND
“I think it was a very smart move that Mother Nature did by linking the generation of new ideas and reward,” Salvi says. “Every time something is rewarding, we tend to want to do it more.”
And the more we think creatively, the more humanity moves ahead. Insight, Oh says, stimulates “curiosity and exploration and the production of new ideas that induce the advancement of all aspects of human society, including science, technology and culture. It has evolutionary advantage.”
Marcel Danesi is a professor of semiotics (the study of signs and symbols) and anthropology at the University of Toronto and author of several books on puzzles. Solving puzzles seems to be instinctive both to individuals — ask a child why a chicken crosses the road, and they will immediately try to figure it out — and cultures. “When cultures become conscious of themselves, the first things they resort to are things like riddles,” he says. The ancient Greeks and Romans loved challenging their minds in this way, and an expression equivalent to aha! appears in an ancient Egyptian manuscript.
He says puzzling ideas tend to spread between people, even over great distances. Consider this one, which has many variations: A traveller arrives at a riverbank with a goat, a head of cabbage and a wolf. The boat there can only carry the traveller and one other thing at a time. The wolf would eat the goat and the goat would eat the cabbage. So how can they all cross safely? (See solution below.)
To solve a puzzle like this, someone may start a flow chart or diagram. “Once you start doing this, you’re developing a science,” he says. “It leads to logic. This has occurred over and over in the history of puzzles.”
The greater good is probably not why we’re so keen on jigsaws, mysteries and other insight- giving activities in times like pandemics. “Puzzles give psychological order to the chaos we feel,” Danesi says. “When you come out of it, when you’ve solved the puzzle, then life seems to work better. I’ve had anecdotes throughout my life and experiences where, as people do puzzles, they seem to come out better in terms of mental health.”
Salvi warns pressures such as anxiety reduce our ability to achieve moments of insight. So does a lack of time. “I do think that, for some people, solving problems might be a very, very nice way to feel momentarily rewarded and put your mind away from the news,” she says. “It’s a way to escape reality.”
Note: To get the wolf, goat and cabbage across the river safely, the traveller should follow these steps:
1. Cross with the goat, leave it on the far side and return to the original riverbank alone.
2. Cross with the wolf, leave it on the far side and return to the original riverbank with the goat.
3. Leave the goat on the original riverbank, cross with the cabbage and leave the cabbage with the wolf.
4. Return and get the goat.