How Puzzles may Improve your Mind

As many readers of the Math Mojo Chronicles know, my wife and I do the New York Times crossword puzzle together every Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

You may also be aware that the Friday and Saturday NYT Crossword puzzles are harder than the Sunday puzzle. Sometimes much harder.

I don’t know if I could solve many of them alone, but together, we are a pretty good team. Mimi can brainstorm and come up with things I could never get, and I can help filter out some of the wild Ideas she comes up with that would jam the puzzle.

By “jam,” I mean, if you put in an answer that turns out to be wrong, it will mislead you from getting the answers that cross that answer in the puzzle. It can send you down wrong paths, and keep you from noticing the right ones.

One thing that we’ve found on many puzzles, at least over the last few years since we started doing them, is that there will often be a mention of something that appears in the NYT that day. Often it’s from the magazine section.

Unfortunately, we can’t get delivery of the NYT where we live (too rural). I used to get the paper from the truck stop each Sunday, but I stopped a few years ago. So we don’t get a lot of the references anymore. (Stay with me – this will be relevant soon.)

We usually do the puzzle during meals, and we get Sunday in one meal, on average, and Friday or Saturday usually take two or more meals. That leaves lots of meals during the rest of the week without puzzles, so we go back into the NYT online puzzle archives when we run out of puzzles. We subscribe to the puzzle section of the NYT online. It’s about $39 a year, and totally worth it.

This week we were doing the puzzle for Friday, Nov. 29, 1996 (from the archives). We almost finished it by the third meal. But there was one particular spot that was getting us. 24 down was: “Heraldic bands.” We have no Idea what this could be.

We had all the letters for it except for two. The first was the second from the top, which crosses 28 across: “U.S.D.A power agcy.” We originally thought it must be the F.D.A, but the second letter in it is definitely “e.”

The other missing letter was the second from the last letter, which crosses 39 across: “Els with tees.” We had all of the other letters in 39 across. “E ,R, N, I, ___. Yes, I know some of you know this right away, out of context. But we were totally lost. We know nothing about the context. Of course we could guess at “Ernie” and we imagined it would be right. But we had no corroboration.

Back to the point I made above, about how sometimes you get hints from what’s in the newspapers that day. This is a very cool thing the NYT does. It reinforces what you’ve read that day. And this is one of the things that I believe puzzles help your mind with. Any time you cross-reference information in your mind, you are building connections. These are sometimes referred to as “neural pathways.” You can read more about such things here:

• neural pathways: http://www.neuralpathways.org.uk/articles/repetition.htm

• neuroplasticity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity

(Please keep in mind that I am not an expert in this field, and you should take these thoughts and websites as a “jumping-off point” and not as Gospel.)

As we did the Friday, Nov. 29, 1996 puzzle, we figured we could get no help from the current newspaper. We had started the puzzle two days ago.

So how surprised was I when my wife brought home the paper from the nearest “city” (population: about 15,000, Motto: “City of Pizza and Beer – We Used to be Somebody, but then they took the Trains Out”) and there was an article in the sports section which gave us a hint? We normally don’t read the sports section – but Mimi scanned the caption of the photo on the cover. The picture was from this week’s U.S. Open at  Pebble Beach. There were two golfers kneeling and checking out a shot.

Amazingly, the caption started, “Tiger woods and Ernie Els Line up putts on the 12th hole…”

“Els with tees.” Ernie Els, the golfer! Get it?

Here’s the thing – If we’d have simply gone with our “instincts” and put in Ernie to begin with, we would have forgotten about it later, because we would have given ourselves the feeling that we had “solved” it. We may have gotten the right answer, but it would have been a dumb guess, and we would have learned nothing.

By not taking the easy way out, and staying curious, we learned something. This was a shining example of how that works.

Some people may think, “Hey, big deal – so you learned something about a sport you don’t care about.” But they’d be missing the point. We are developing a healthy habit. By not being mentally lazy, and keeping our curiosity open instead of giving ourselves credit for “solving” something without understanding it, we are creating more neural pathways. Not just this time – it is a habit.

Doing puzzles is a perfect way to develop such habits. Think of it as like playing a sport. There really is no sense in hitting a little dimpled ball around with a crooked stick. But you’d be developing patience, hand-eye coordination, and the ability to handle hours and hours of boring nonsense. (Whoops… sorry golf fans.)

As much as I like puzzles, I’ve come to think of math as about the ultimate puzzle. Not in the sense of it being confusing (because by its nature it aims at reducing confusion and creating clarity), but in the sense that it has logical rules but requires creativity to understand and use in any meaningful sense .

If you like to sharpen your mind, make yourself more mentally resilient, learn something useful, and have a good time doing it, I don’t think you can do better than learn math and mathematical philosophy.

P.S. -  After getting Ernie there was one space to go. We were stumped. We’d have to guess. So we did. In other words, we didn’t fully solve this puzzle. We had to “cheat” and check the answers on the puzzle we’d downloaded.

What’s an orle? Check out this picture. The blue border is the orle. I told  you Friday puzzles could be hard!

Did I say hard? How about diabolical? Although REA is the answer to “USDA power agcy.”  I still had to do some serious Googling to find out what that meant. it turns out that it’s the Rural Electrification Administration one of the New Deal agencies created under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which was the foreunner to the Rural Utilities Service.

I also checked out Ernie Els. They guy was competing fourteen years ago when this puzzle was made. Now he is tied for second place in the U.S. Open. Pretty impressive. Maybe more impressive is that he has established the charitable organization, Els for Autism Foundation.

P.P.S. - There is another Math Mojo Chronicles post along these lines at Crossword Puzzle Digression. It mentions a good resource to help you understand the logic of the answers of the NYT crossword puzzle. Unfortunately that resource did not exist in 1996, so I was reduced to googling this time .