Puzzling properties: Why our brains like being teased

A few weeks ago, the world celebrated the 1000th word in Josh Wardle’s popular 5-letter 6-try game, Wordle. Platforms like Duolingo, Uber, Spotify and Headspace all celebrated the occasion with special offers and discounts. Since its inception, the uptake of the game skyrocketed, and it was acquired by the New York Times in 2022 for an undisclosed 7-figure sum. What about this game made it so popular, and why did it appeal to us in the way that it did??

Fundamentally, a puzzle is a challenge. As your eyes dart across sudoku quadrants or scan an escape room, your brain is engaging its critical thinking, creative and problem solving capabilities. Solving is a reward – it releases dopamine, making us seek out similar feelings in the future. One of the most famously used brain teasers is what is called the Monty Hall problem. The premise of the American TV show ‘Let’s Make a Deal’, hosted by Monty Hall for 28 years, presented participants with a dilemma:?

Suppose you face 3 doors. Behind one door is a car. Behind the other, goats. You pick a door (call it door 1). You’re hoping for the car of course. The host examines the other doors (2 & 3) and opens one with a goat. (If both doors have goats, he picks randomly). Here’s the game: Do you stick with door 1 (original guess) or switch to the unopened door? Does it matter?

Follow this link to try the game yourself, and see why switching gives you a better chance of winning. Most research has focused on why people stick to their original choice: because they’d feel worse if they had moved from a winning door to a losing one, than if they had stuck with the losing door. Essentially, we don’t like when our brains are teased too much. We like some sense of control, even if it’s control of a loss. In a deep-dive on Wordle’s popularity during the pandemic, Vox suggested an extension of this idea – that Wordle’s simplicity is exactly what a burnt-out COVID-processing brain needed. It allowed us to be part of a cultural phenomenon even though we played it alone.

There is no single history of puzzles, says linguistic anthropologist Marcel Danesi, because they come in so many genres and traditions. There is a strong recreational aspect to it, as Biblical kings Solomon and Hiram organized riddling competitions for the pure joy of outwitting one another, or more recently, escape rooms throw you and your companions into a novel situation and force you to find your way out of it. These elements of creatively thinking through a situation, in a social manner, have been extrapolated to the world of education as game-based teaching and learning. The global market for game-based learning is expected to reach a revenue of $29.7 billion by the end of 2026, with a compound annual growth rate of 21.9%. Research indicates that it enhances memory retention, promotes interactive learning, highlights practical applications of concepts and leads to an overall better understanding. As much as we would like to think of it as a modern development, the foundations of it have been around for centuries.?

The ultimate purpose of a puzzle then, says Danesi, lies in the ‘aha!’ or the end-state – they are fun, but they also have a right answer. Again, we come back to our brains wanting to be teased, but within the confines of a right and wrong, a win and lose, a hit and miss. Perhaps, as the world around us gets more complex, scary or difficult, we turn to things that allow us to control these emotions, and reward us for doing so. And, what better way to learn than by having fun?

Paths explores topical developments at the intersection of culture, business, technology, and society. Each month we delve into a concept, unpack it through an interdisciplinary lens, and present alternate ways of looking at it for our readers: alternative paths. Want to know more about our work? Reach out to us on?[email protected]?or head to?www.lagomworks.com