Aha!, by Eric Berlin

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So what is it about puzzles, anyway? Why do I solve them every day and why am I working so diligently to convert kids to a lifetime of puzzle love with my Winston Breen books?

There are a few reasons I could throw at you. There’s my general fascination with words, and how they can be bent and shaped and turned into curlicues. Who can fail to adore the fact that the letters of ONE PLUS TWELVE can be scrambled to make the mathematically equivalent sentence, TWO PLUS ELEVEN? Don’t tell me that is not as awesome as a fireworks display.

So there’s that, my ceaseless love of wordplay.

But stronger than that is my love of the Aha! moment.

In my last post, I talked about some puzzles you can create for your kids. What I didn’t say is that your children may not solve them quite as quickly as you created them. They might struggle a little. What you’ve handed them will at first look like nonsense: A bunch of letters all mashed together. Or maybe not even that. The Pigpen code, at first glance, is just a lot of squiggly lines.

Watch your child as he or she tries that first puzzle, which is called an Anaquote. The solver has to scramble the columns of letters so that they spell a message reading across the rows. This may not be an automatic thing for a nine-year-old or a ten-year-old to do. In my sample puzzle, I don’t indicate spaces between the words, and some words start on one line but wrap to the next. That’s not quite how a kid normally reads.

But give it some time and—Aha!—your kid will make the breakthrough. (Possibly with a nudge from you, possibly not.) The first four letters spell LOOK! If we arrange these strips to spell that word, the rest of the message falls neatly into place! I say again: Aha!

That’s the magic right there. It makes no difference if you’re circling a word in a word seek or if you’ve filled in the final letters of a Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle. Either way, you’ve just experienced the Aha! moment. It is the moment when nonsense turns into order; when you’ve spotted the pattern amid all the noise; when the answer you’ve been seeking reveals itself to you, because you have earned it.

There are vast bodies of literature informing us that eating chocolate releases certain pleasure-inducing chemicals into our systems, and thus the term “chocoholic” is, for some people, technically correct. I haven’t looked it up, but I would be very surprised if the Aha! moment didn’t have a similar effect on our brains. You get the answer you’ve been looking for—possibly after a long struggle—and are rewarded with a burst of satisfaction that is hard to top. Forget whether or not solving puzzles keeps you healthy. Maybe that’s true. All I know is, solving puzzles feels good.

Eric Berlin, The Potato Chip Puzzles, YR mystery, Penguin Books