Of all the ways to challenge your ingenuity, puzzles and riddles are the most fun. Who doesn't like to have their intellect tickled by a perplexing logic problem, a deliberately ambiguous enigma, or an innocent jigsaw puzzle that puts your skills of observation and dexterity to the test.
Apart from being a fun activity, puzzles also come with therapeutic benefits. Engaging in crosswords or sudokus has proven to be beneficial to brain health, for example by delaying the onset of Alzheimer's disease. Thankfully, there is no risk of ever running out of medicine as puzzles come in all shapes and sizes, providing a veritable ocean of mind-stimulating entertainment. Let's dive a little deeper.
A puzzling variety
When hearing the word 'puzzle', the first thing that comes to mind is the ever-popular jigsaw puzzle which has been around since the 18th century and was introduced as a teaching aid. But puzzles come in a variety of different shapes and sizes - think of the Chinese tangram, peg solitaire, the Rubik's Cube, or puzzle boxes, which actually originate from Renaissance furniture and have recently gained quite some popularity on YouTube.
Picture puzzles like spot the difference, where two or more seemingly identical images need to be thoroughly scanned for discrepancies, challenge one's pattern recognition abilities.
We would be remiss not to mention the virtual world – apart from obvious candidates like Tetris or Minesweeper, there are countless video games where puzzle solving is essential to winning.
There are, of course, puzzles that require nothing but your brain. Take minute mysteries: ostensibly nonsensical little stories that must be investigated by means of yes-or-no questions to fill in the information that makes them plausible, giving your lateral thinking skills a chance to shine.
Mathematical and logic puzzles put your grey matter to work, and not always with a satisfying outcome: a few are simply unsolvable.
It's impossible to list the countless varieties of puzzles here, but what all of them have in common is that it requires logic and/or critical thinking to put the pieces – be they literal or figurative – together. There is, however, one kind of puzzle that takes a different approach – a sneaky relative, the black sheep of the puzzle family – riddles.
Riddles: The puzzles ambiguous cousin
Riddles were already around when humans first put chisel to stone. They are a part of basically every culture on the planet. These insidious brainteasers dress up as puzzles and lure you in with apparent straightforwardness – but under the veneer of a simple phrase or question, ambiguity lurks. Puzzles, on the other hand, may be hard and even contain the occasional red herring, but at least they are based in logic and have a clear goal. They are straight talkers; riddles are not.
Two-faced by nature, riddles come in two different forms: the enigma and the conundrum. Enigmas lean heavily on your understanding of metaphors and allegories. Many of the best-known examples date back to antiquity, the most popular one probably being the Riddle of the Sphinx from Greek mythology: "It walks on four legs in the morning, on two at noon, and on three in the evening, yet when it has the most legs it walks the slowest." The answer is, of course, "man" – but you couldn't solve the riddle if you took the words literally. The course of the day stands in for a human lifetime, and a walking stick becomes the elderly's third leg.
Conundrums are posed as questions. Either the question itself or the answer involves a pun. On the surface, they appear to be more benign than enigmas because their goal is to prise a giggle out of you – but since you aren't necessarily aware of that, it's usually next to impossible to figure out the answer, making this kind of riddle even more deceptive. Conundrums have a tendency to make you cringe in a way that is eerily similar to dad jokes: Why does no one ever starve in the desert? Because of all the sand which is there. You had been warned.
Puzzles and the brain
Puzzles in all their varieties provide a cornucopia of entertainment, but there's more to them than mere fun. They have changed the way we approach scientific research; they make us happier, and they have even been proven to make us smarter.
Toddlers who piece together simple jigsaw puzzles train their pattern recognition skills, spatial awareness, memory, and dexterity, and stimulate the development of neural pathways in their brains.
Researchers from the University of Michigan have even developed a puzzle game that they claim can add four points to your IQ if played on a daily basis.
Puzzles also foster your concentration, reduce stress, and lighten your mood by increasing the dopamine production in your brain. All of this leads to better productivity which is why a growing number of companies nowadays include puzzle games in their resting areas.
On a greater scale, mathematical puzzles have inspired research that led to innovative methodologies - ultimately advancing our scientific understanding.
With all of this in mind, what reason could there be not to love the multitude of puzzles, riddles, and games waiting to be solved, cracked, and won? Without them, the world would be a much more mundane place.
To really get you going, we leave you with this little brainteaser: If Pinocchio said, "I am lying now", would his nose grow?