A fas­ci­nat­ing New York Time arti­cle on solv­ing puz­zles: Why you do it, how you do it, and what’s going on in your brain while you do it.

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.

There are dif­fer­ent ways to solve a puz­zle: an ana­lyt­i­cal way of trial and errors and an “insight” or cre­ative way.  Recent neu­roimag­ing stud­ies looked at what hap­pens in the brain of peo­ple prepar­ing to solve a puz­zle. Results sug­gest that a par­tic­u­lar sig­na­ture of prepara­tory activ­ity, one that is strongly cor­re­lated with pos­i­tive moods, can be observed in people’s brains who are more likely to solve puz­zles with sud­den insight than with trial and error. This sig­na­ture includes acti­va­tion in a brain area (the ante­rior cin­gu­late cor­tex) active when peo­ple widen or nar­row their attention:

In this case of insight puzzle-solving, the brain seems to widen its atten­tion, in effect mak­ing itself more open to dis­trac­tion, to weaker con­nec­tions.[…] This dif­fuse brain state is not only an intel­lec­tual one, open to looser con­nec­tions between words and concepts.

Com­ment: The author of the arti­cle con­cludes, “that a dis­tracted brain can be a more insight­ful one.” How­ever this is not really about being “dis­tracted” but about hav­ing a wider focus of atten­tion. Being dis­tracted would mean expe­ri­enc­ing intru­sive thoughts and feel­ings that dis­rupt think­ing.  Hav­ing a wider focus of atten­tion is still an atten­tive state but of dif­fer­ent qual­ity. It may be close to the state of atten­tion at the core of mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tion in which one doesn’t let the mind wan­der ran­domly (being dis­tracted) but actively mon­i­tor and man­age one’s atten­tion and mind.

A wider focus of atten­tion may enable you to notice the funny thing hap­pen­ing in this video…

Don’t blame your­self if you miss it. You may just be using another type of atten­tion: Selec­tive (or focused) attention.

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