Your Humble Blogger has started doing crosswords again. I go through phases with crosswords: I go years without the slightest urge to do one, and then I start doing them every day, or maybe two or three a day, for a few weeks, and then I’m all done for another few years. This time is different; I added the goofy NYT crossword widget to my Google page, which gives me only one puzzle a week, and that’s all I’m doing.\n
I have never been particularly good at crosswords. I mean, by good-at-crosswords standards. I know the general standard is by NYT day-of-the-week, with Monday being easiest and Saturday hardest (if I am remembering correctly); crossword solvers can describe themselves as being Thursday-level or Wednesday-level, depending on which day they have to really start thinking about the puzzle rather than just filling in the little boxes. The ones the NYT is making available vary in difficulty, and they give the date of publication, so I could figure out the day of the week, but I don’t. Generally, though, I find them moderately time-consuming. I can’t just whip through them, but neither do I generally leave anything blank, or at any rate, not more than a square or two.\n
What I wanted to write about, though, was the odd thing that happens with puzzles, that I experience with crosswords because those are the ones I do, but I understand is a general phenomenon. I get stuck, I walk away from the puzzle, and then I come back the next day and find a bunch of stuff that seems really easy, and I can’t figure out why I was stuck. I’m not talking about the thing where you get two or three clues you didn’t get before, and that gives you a long one, and then you’ve broken the back of the puzzle. No, I’m talking about the ones you were staring at, had no idea about, and then without getting any new letters, the answers suddenly become obvious.\n
You all have this, right? About crosswords, or sodoko, or rebussess’s, or videogames, or coding, or carpentry, or whatever you work on. It’s so common that I don’t think I’ve ever really questioned it before. Of course, if you are trying to work something out, and you are stuck, you walk away from it for a while, and then come back with fresh eyes. Everyone knows that.\n
But… why? Why would that work? I mean, the synapses aren’t, you know, actually wearing grooves in the wrong places in the brain. That’s a metaphor. There’s no evolutionary benefit to humans developing an inability to solve crossword puzzles on one go, but an ability to get inspiration on a second look. The brain isn’t a magic eight-ball that needs shaking up to get a good chance at a positive answer, or a deck of cards that has to be shuffled to prevent the patterns from the previous deal affecting the next one. You aren’t actually changing the brain, physically, at all. Right? You are just walking away and coming back.\n
I don’t mean to in any way denigrate the experience, or the brain for that matter. It’s really cool that I can think about other things and then come back to a problem and have a chance at improving my thinking about it. It just seems—well, if you<\/i> were designing human brain function, Gentle Reader, is that the sort of feature you would select?\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In which Your Humble Blogger should have known that ‘down maker’ was ‘eider’, right, even if I was blanking on Sergio Leone’s last name?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12457"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18890,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12457\/revisions\/18890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}