MacGougan at Large

Notes on Word Puzzles - 4

Do Puzzles Make Us Smarter?

This question is itself a puzzle. In some ways solving puzzles does make us smarter, and in some ways it doesn’t.

The skills you pick up solving puzzles are very specific. Solving a given kind of puzzle does make you better at solving that type of puzzle. If you do a lot of crosswords, you’re going to get better at crosswords. But you won’t necessarily get better at any other kind of puzzle, much less become a smarter or more effective person in general.

The value of working on puzzles partly depends on what you’d be doing otherwise. If you’re playing hooky from doing your taxes or learning a new language or writing the Great American Novel, then solving a crossword puzzle may be a welcome break but it might not represent a net plus for your cognitive health.

On the other hand, if you’re solving a puzzle rather than immersing yourself in cat-related TikTok videos, then it’s probably helping you - if not to be smarter, at least to be losing your wits more slowly.

This may sound like a pathetic lack of ambition, but losing our wits more slowly is serious business for those of us past a traditional retirement age.

At the risk of being morbid, there are two potential strategies for those of us over a traditional retirement age. There’s the “you can’t take it with you, so use everything up” approach. The ideal with this approach is that - on the last day of your life - you spend your last dollar, every system in your body fails at once, and you lose your last marble. In sports talk, you leave everything on the field.

Alternatively, there’s the “keep the fire burning” approach. The ideal here is to make it to the finish line solvent, reasonably healthy (other than that “finish line” thing), and still in possession of as many of our marbles as ever. The logic here is that we don’t know how many years we’ll get, and we don’t want to get caught in a bad place if we’re unlucky enough to live to 120.

Note that this focus on maintaining what we have shouldn’t foreclose the possibility of actually moving forward. Ten months into retirement, I’m probably in better physical shape than I was a year ago. Mental shape is harder to gauge.

I devote time to a wide variety of puzzles - mostly for diversion, but also with some hope that it’s doing me good. To the extent that it represents a commitment on my part to “keep the fire going”, I’m sure it is good. How much specific benefit I get is a little murky, though.

Here’s my daydream hope: By working on a sufficiently diverse range of puzzles, the skills I develop from each of them will somehow coalesce within me into a more generalized competence at life.

I have to admit, though, that it’s a little bit like trying to draw a picture of the night sky using a ballpoint pen.