The Creative Spark

Puzzle-solving is an ancient, universal practice precisely because it depends on creative insight similar to the primitive spark that ignited the first campfires. But where does this creative spark come from. Now, modern neuroscientists have gotten into this game. In an interesting article, Benedict Carey follows the growing consensus in science on the birth of the creative spark. And it will make you smile.

In a just completed study, researchers at Northwestern University found that people were more likely to solve word puzzles with sudden insight when they were amused, having just seen a short comedy routine. “What we think is happening,” said Mark Beeman, a neuroscientist who conducted the study, “is that the humor, this positive mood, is lowering the brain’s threshold for detecting weaker or more remote connections to solve puzzles”.

This and other recent research suggest that the appeal of puzzles goes far deeper than the dopamine-reward rush of finding a solution. The very idea of doing a crossword or a Sudoku puzzle typically shifts the brain into an open, playful state that is itself a pleasing escape, is captivating to many people. And that escape is all the more tantalizing for it being incomplete. Unlike the cryptic social and professional mazes of real life, puzzles are reassuringly soluble; but like any serious problem, they require more than mere intellect to crack.

“It’s imagination, it’s inference, it’s guessing; and much of it is happening subconsciously,” said Marcel Danesi, a professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto and the author of “The Puzzle Instinct: The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life.”

“It’s all about you, using your own mind, without any method or schema, to restore order from chaos,” Dr. Danesi said. “And once you have, you can sit back and say, ‘Hey, the rest of my life may be a disaster, but at least I have a solution.’ ”

For almost a century scientists have used puzzles to study what they call insight thinking, the leaps of understanding that seem to come out of the blue, without the incremental drudgery of analysis. All along, researchers have debated the definitions of insight and analysis, and some have doubted that the two are any more than sides of the same coin. Either way, creative problem-solving, it seems, usually requires both analysis and sudden out-of-the-box insight.

Yet the “Aha!” moment of seeing a solution is only one step along a pathway. In a series of recent studies, Dr. Beeman at Northwestern and John Kounios, a psychologist at Drexel University, have imaged people’s brains as they prepare to tackle a puzzle but before they’ve seen it. Those whose brains show a particular signature of preparatory activity, one that is strongly correlated with positive moods, turn out to be more likely to solve the puzzles with sudden insight than with trial and error (the clues can be solved either way). In the case of insight puzzle-solving, it seems that the brain widens its attention, in effect making itself more open to distraction, and to weaker connections. The punch line is that a good joke can move the brain toward just this kind of state.

But the idea that a distracted brain can be a more insightful one is still a work in progress. So, for that matter, is the notion that puzzle-solving helps the brain in any way to navigate the labyrinth of soured relationships, uncertain career options or hard choices that so often define the world outside.

But at the very least, acing the Saturday crossword or some mind-bending Sudoku suggests that some of the tools for the job are intact. And as any puzzle-head can attest, that buoyant, open state of mind isn’t a bad one to try on for size once in a while. Whether you’re working a puzzle or not.