Last Updated on March 4, 2024 by Asfa Rasheed
Do you remember the first puzzle game you played? Maybe not, but what if we tell you that playing those puzzle games regularly can actually sharpen your memory and a lot of things won’t run out of your mind?
Most of us look at puzzles just as games to kill our time. But it’s not so true, especially in this smartphone era where hundreds of high-quality puzzle games are created not just for fun but to stimulate your brain and enhance its capacities. If you are looking for starting an interesting activity for the health of your brain, you are on a good track to examine puzzle games.
Here, we are talking about the mental benefits of solving puzzles. We all know that these games are no miracle to make you instantly smarter but a lot of studies have found out what they add to our brains over time. Lets us check how puzzle games help improve your brain performance and what you might be missing about them till now.
Table of Contents
Puzzle Games Enhance Mood and Relieves Stress
When you play puzzle games, dopamine is released in your mind, a chemical that is responsible for making us feel pleasure, satisfaction, and motivation. Mostly we hear dopamine in a negative context but actually, the lack or access of dopamine is dangerous for our body.
If you are stressed and play a good puzzle game like sudoku, 2048 or its other variations, your brain is stimulated and is almost away from thinking about the problem. There are no challenges posed to you from outside the area of your focus, which is the Puzzle at the moment. Well, neglecting your problem is never a solution but sometimes we just need relief for our brain. With puzzles, we are almost in a meditative stage.
Not only while playing the game but when you solve a puzzle, it gives you a sense of control and satisfaction. Puzzle games that require us to organize things also make us believe that tasks if performed with good planning can be finished. Overall, your stress and anxiety levels are decreased and your brain is in condition to receive the other things well.
Improve Memory Retention Capacity
Not all puzzle games will help you with your memory. But the games that require you to keep a few things in mind to use later or games like crosswords that need you to remember things you already might know, improve your attentiveness and memory retention abilities.
Simple mind games are especially helpful for kids at a very young age as they help them form new neural connections. These games are the best way to improve the short-term memory of children.
All Parts of the Brain Gets Activated
As we talked about Dopamine, it can be really dangerous if supplied to only one part of the brain. That’s what mostly happens when we get the dopamine from social networking apps or drugs. Playing puzzle games gets all parts of our brain get activated.
The left side of our brain is credited to dealing with mathematical and logical abilities and sequencing while the right side is responsible for creativity, imagination, and intuitions. While playing a good puzzle game, all these parts are challenged to carry on a task with coordination. And as you play and finish these games, your brain is certainly in better condition because of the exercises it has performed.
Keeps Alive Your Cognitive Abilities With Age
As we are advised to exercise and meditate daily to fight the ill effects of aging and to feel energetic at the later stage of life, the same goes for our minds as well. You might be familiar with the phrase about the brain i.e “use it or you’ll lose it”.
Games like Chess, memory card games, Sudoku, and other puzzle games can be used for brain training. A popular study has suggested that brain training related to problem-solving and reasoning improved memory and performance in tasks among elderly people. These games also lower the risk of dementia and Alzheimers but there is no proof of improvement in already existing conditions of these diseases.
Enhance Spatial Visual Intelligence Among Kids
It is important to develop spatial intelligence in kids from a very young age so that their brains can comprehend things better when they grow up. Spatial Visual intelligence as you know is the ability to imagine, visualize and analyze problems or patterns in an efficient manner.
Puzzles as simple as Jigsaw puzzles demand children to understand the shapes that will go together and train their minds in solving a case using their visual intelligence. It teaches them to relate smaller things to the bigger issues at hand. This will help the kids in forming new neural connections, critical thinking, reasonability, and also, to some extent, vocabulary.
Better Hand-Eye Coordination
Hand-eye coordination is also connected to the brain and visual intelligence of children. You might have seen kids can’t judge a ball coming their way with the perfect timing or not able to draw or color even simple things. While playing puzzles, their brain forces them to make correct decisions and their eyes, mind, and hands work together to solve a problem. Kids who solve puzzles regularly have their brains trained to complete the physical tasks given to them.
Helps in Problem Solving
A lot of people almost give up on a problem when they can’t analyze it. While solving a puzzle, we can’t rush things. It takes a time to analyze what the games require us to do and what we need to accomplish it. We have to make a step-by-step strategy.
Playing tough puzzle games and solving them trains our brain to not get disrupted by just the appearance of a problem. Our brain understands better that there have to be ways to solve the problem and we don’t hesitate in inculcating the trial and error method approach.
Puzzle Games Can Help Improve IQ
Puzzle games can’t improve your IQ directly. Otherwise, it would have been too easy for teachers to produce very smart kids from their classes. But the benefits we told you about puzzle games above come in handy in improving the intelligence of a person.
Children or adults who regularly solve puzzles are more curious than others and thus end up knowing and grasping more. As there is a good reasoning puzzle available to solve, and they improve your reasoning abilities, it has a very good impact on your intelligence quotient.
Conclusion
Solving puzzles has always been associated with proving the intelligence and problem-solving capacity of your brain. There might be a lot of myths regarding these games being the ultimate savior of your brain but puzzles sure have some role to play.
So many studies have been conducted to see the impact of solving puzzles mong kids and adults and they don’t completely neglect the chances of improvement. So these were some ways that Puzzle games help improve your Brain.
It is important to point out that playing just one or two games won’t necessarily work. There are different boards games, phone and computer games related to speed, memory, reasoning, analyzing, etc that will play a role in the overall development of your brain. A healthy diet, a good sleeping schedule, and regular exercises are the other important things that help your brain grow.
Read more: PRINCE2 Project Management Techniques
