Puzzles and Creativity

Have you been caught up with the recent Wordle craze? I have. I love how some of us were sharing scores on social media – especially the ones where we have the least amount of guesses! I enjoy doing puzzles. But I must confess I don’t do enough of them. While there is so much information that tells us that keeping our brains active in this way is a great way to keep dementia away, puzzles are very good for improving creativity too.

Puzzles and Creativity

Puzzles are a lot of fun to solve and to boost your creativity at the same time. Brain-stimulating games like sudoko, anagrams, crossword puzzles, Rubik’s cube and even jigsaw puzzles, help you to look for solutions from various perspectives. Exercising your mind in this way, helps you to approach situations from different angles, and you become open to new ideas and concepts. This naturally, improves your creativity.

Some resources and puzzles

I love Edward de Bono’s work. I found his whole concept of lateral thinking so fascinating.

He describes lateral thinking as

• seeking to solve problems by apparently illogical means
• a process and willingness to look at things in a different way
• a relatively new type of thinking that complements analytical and critical thinking not part of our mainstream education – yet
• a fast, effective tool used to help individuals, companies and teams solve tough problems and create new ideas, new products, new processes and new services.
• a term that is used interchangeably with creativity.

You’ll find plenty of lateral thinking puzzles here.

A while ago I shared with you information about Ruth Curran’s book  ‘Being Brain Healthy‘.  Ruth has some great puzzles on her blog  – try out this word puzzle.

I love working puzzles like this out. Let’s see how many of the six you get right.

1.

KNEE
____________
LIGHT

2.

W
O
R
H
T

3.
MAN
____________
BOARD

4.

OATH
_____________
UR

5.

CRAZY
________
YOU

6.

0
__________________
PhD
M.A
B.Sc.

I hope you enjoyed giving your mind a workout and increasing your creativity too.

I’d love to see your guesses in the comments.

May you be inspired – every day!

Corinne

Linking in to Kate Motaung’s Five Minute Friday Weekly Link up

Linking in to Kate Motaung’s Five Minute Friday Weekly Link up