A quote, a proverb and a riddle

1. ‘Happiness is having a large, loving, caring close-knit family . . . (in another city)’
2. ‘Two is company, three is… the Musketeers!’ [Well, the right answer is ‘a crowd’ but we are not going to argue here 😊];
3. ‘If I have three, I have three; if I have two, I have two; if I have one, I have none.’

Now, which of the three do you like best? Chances are, it is the last one. And there are good reasons for this. [In case you are wondering, the answer is ‘choices’.]

Connecting the dots

Why is it that we derive such great pleasure from riddles? The answer is that nature rewards us every time we ‘connect the dots’ and we make sense of something. Ramachandran and Hirstein (1999) make this point in their ‘Laws of Artistic Experience’. Watch this clip: https://bit.ly/3kh01CD [7:55]. In the same way that nature rewards us when we manage to see something which is hard to make out [same clip – 3:43], we get a small dopamine shot when we make sense of a puzzle. In both cases, we experience an ‘a-ha!’ moment. Just like children enjoy joining up the dots to make a drawing of something or adults enjoy the brainteasers on social media where ‘only those with a high IQ can see a panda in this picture’ humans get a kick out of ‘cracking’ something – a puzzle or a riddle or a lateral thinking task.

Supernormal stimuli

Organisms have evolved to respond to certain stimuli. For example, we love sweet, ripe fruit. Supernormal stimuli are things which do not (normally) exist in nature and which trigger a much stronger response than ordinary stimuli would (watch this fantastic three-minute clip: https://bit.ly/3iAHW1K).

Ripe fruit is one thing, but cheesecake is quite another: ‘[we respond with] trickles of enjoyment from the sweet taste of ripe fruit, the creamy-mouth feel of fats and oils from nuts and meat, and the coolness of fresh water. Cheesecake packs a sensual wallop unlike anything in the natural world because it is a brew of megadoses of agreeable stimuli which we concocted for the express purpose of pressing our pleasure buttons’ (Barash 2012:151).

Once we grasp the idea, we begin to discover supernormal stimuli wherever we look: plush toys are just too cute to resist, soap operas encourage binge-watching and people (the writer included) have been known to play chess for hours.

Puzzles as supernormal stimuli

It is this last category that is of interest to us. Here is Deirdre Barrett: ‘As our intellects grew more complex, humans were rewarded for seeking novel, challenging problems and attacking them with a passion that would have been futile for any other animal. This intellectual curiosity generates its own version of supernormal stimuli – problems more intriguing than any practical ones.’ (Barrett 2010:159). Two excellent examples are Rubik’s cube and Sudoku puzzles, both of which have proved hugely popular. Wordle is another.

So this is the idea: if puzzles hold such great motivational power, why not make sure that they feature prominently in our lessons? Granted, neither chess nor Sudoku are likely to improve a learner’s English, but other puzzles certainly can. Here are some examples:

• Riddles The great thing about riddles (at least from the point of view of an EL teacher) is that they are based on language. Also, they are very, very short and they are extremely easy to find (e.g. https://bit.ly/3H6T1Ry). So here is an idea: why not divide up the class into groups, give each group fifty riddles and see how many they manage to solve within five minutes? Riddles can hook you instantly – like this one for instance: ‘What question can you never answer ‘Yes’ to?’. *
• Detective mysteries Detective mysteries are fascinating, but usually they are too long to be used in class, or they might require too much time to figure out the solution. However, one can actually find very short mini-puzzles on YouTube, so short, in fact, they can even be used as fillers. This clip (https://bit.ly/3w3yQ0E) is only nine minutes long, it contains seven ‘mysteries’ and in each case viewers are only given fifteen seconds to find the solution. It also has 35 million hits, which says something about how popular such clips are!
• Grid puzzles My favourite reading tasks are ones where students read some clues and they then have to arrange some information into a grid. There are many of them freely available online – simply google ‘ELT grid logic puzzles’ (for a good example click here: https://bit.ly/3H5QPKg). A great way of using these is to turn this into an information-gap activity by having students working in pairs and giving each of them half the clues. Students will then have to work out the solution by communicating, which is an added bonus for us.
• Problem-solving puzzles Another kind of puzzle is a more open-ended one, where there is often more than one possible solution (see Ur 1981:80–88). A good example of this is the ‘Zoo puzzle’ (https://bit.ly/3IReZto) where students are given the layout of a zoo along with some information (e.g. ‘One of the two lions has died’) and they have to rearrange the animals in the various enclosures given certain conditions (e.g. ‘Predators should not be next to prey animals’). This can lead to an enormous amount of discussion.
• Mind Trap Mind Trap is a board game which features a combination of quick logic brainteasers (e.g. ‘How could you give someone AUD $63 using six notes without using one dollar notes or coins?’) and lateral thinking questions (e.g. ‘Some months have 30 days and some have 31. How many months have 28 days?’).** The great thing about this activity is that it is actually a real game. To get the most out of the idea, you might want to divide students into two teams and have them search for such questions online and then test their opponents in class.
• Crosswords These are both addictive and excellent for language learning. There are hundreds of them freely available on the web, with the clues covering synonyms, opposites, sentences with gaps, and definitions. There are also many sites where crosswords are graded for level, such as ESL Crosswords (https://bit.ly/3CQ6x9D). And, of course, you can create your own by using free sites (e.g. ‘Puzzlemaker’ on the website Discovery Education). Better still, you can maximise the students’ investment by getting them to write the clues for a crossword they prepare themselves.

Two last tips

When using such activities, there are two important things teachers need to bear in mind: i) pace is hugely important. If students need to think a lot about something, perhaps we should give it as homework. ii) Make sure students can succeed. Constantly failing to ‘get the answer’ can be demotivating. If you have to choose between, say, a hard crossword and an easier one, go for the latter and make speed the challenging element.

What is a successful lesson?

I always feel a lesson has been a good one if students go home and tell their parents: ‘OK – listen to this . . .’. So here are three questions to make sure you tell others about this article (pace is crucial; you only have five seconds for each one):

1. If you divide thirty by half and add ten, what is the answer?
2. How many times can you take 4 from 33?
3. What do you sit on, sleep on and brush your teeth with? No cheating now! 😊 ***.

* ‘Are you asleep?’

** i) One $50 note, one $5 note and four $2 coins.
ii) All of them, of course.

*** 1. 30: ½ = 60 + 10 = 70; 2. Once; 3. A chair, a bed and a toothbrush!

References

Barash, D. (2012). Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary puzzles of human nature. Oxford University Press.

Barrett, D. (2010). Supernormal Stimuli: How primal urges overran their evolutionary purpose. Norton.

Ramachandran, V.S. & Hirstein, W. (1999). ‘The science of art: a neurological theory of aesthetic experience’. Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 6–7:15–51.

Ur, P. (1981). Discussions that Work. Cambridge University Press.

YouTube: ‘Human Nature – Supernormal Stimuli’. Available from https://bit.ly/3iAHW1K (Last accessed 18 January 2023).

YouTube: ‘8 Laws of Artistic Experience’. Available from https://bit.ly/3kh01CD (Last accessed 18 January 2023).