Do crosswords stave off mental decline? It’s the wrong question

It’s easy to understand why the question is often asked: might Wordle – or the crossword, or the sudoku – be a shield against forgetfulness, senescence, even dementia? After all, puzzles sit right there, new ones appearing among the news every day. And in fiction we’ve seen the very smartest people – the people superspy George Smiley turns to for advice – knocking off wordplay while cracking espionage rings.

When it comes to detail, though, the answer has one of two flavours. The first, the responsible flavour, is a gentle letdown: dedicated solvers may be intellectually active, but perhaps that’s why they’re dedicated solvers. Or: doing puzzles might make you better at something, but that something could be limited to the doing of puzzles.

The second kind of answer is heavy on metaphor: your brain is a muscle and will atrophy without a daily workout. This is the kind of answer you hear only from people who have a product named something like Your Daily Brain Workout App (first week free).

Enlightenment comes from asking smaller questions. For example, probability theorist John McSweeney has asked why …

a solver, presented with two puzzles of ostensibly equal difficulty, may solve one readily and be stumped by the other

… which I discovered in some recent writing on how the term “percolation problem” can be used to describe the moment when the grid contains enough written-in answers that the rest seem to start solving themselves.

The utter delight that accompanies that moment is the answer to a much more sensible question than “are crosswords a kind of Alzheimer’s prophylactic?” The question: is it a good thing to solve puzzles? The answer: yes, they bring delight to our lives. In a world seemingly intent on pathologising and medicalising the things we try to do, a puzzle can surely be left alone and understood as something we’re allowed to do purely because it’s fun.

PS in our cluing conference for WHIPS, the runners-up are KenJam’s charming “Cats like what chef does with cream” and GappyTooth’s stark “Those who give discipline to politicians in leathers”; the winner is the raucous “These cats know how to organise a party!” Kludos to Peshwari. Please leave entries for PERCOLATE below, along with any favourite clues or puzzles you’ve spotted.