Why Kids and Adults Need Puzzles
People love to solve mysteries, so there are always more lovers of detective stories than lovers of sentimental and cautionary stories. Riddle games were the first little detectives in which familiar things and phenomena were hidden behind allegories. It is not known who was the first to come up with encrypting knowledge in this way, but it doesn’t matter. Every nation has riddles and puzzles, and this once again confirms the unity of homo sapiens.
Evolution of puzzles
Why are puzzles needed? The obvious answer is to pass the time and give the mind a tireless job. But for our ancestors, the veiled description of events and things had a deeper meaning.
In the very distant past, hunters, farmers, cattle breeders were sure that they were surrounded by hostile forces, and they tried to deceive the spirits with allegories. Later, solving riddles was part of the wedding ceremony and other important events. From fairy tales, we remember how princesses preferred that challenger to half the kingdom who knew how to solve ingenious riddles. The ancient Greeks and Normans organized tournaments in which an obtuse participant dropped out of further competitions once and for all — usually he was deprived of his life.
Try to solve these puzzles:
Fortunately, morals softened over time. Those who did not know how to penetrate the meaning of the “encryption” were considered not very smart, they laughed at him and excluded from the rating of local intellectuals. Nowadays, ordinary puzzles have been superseded by computer quests, IQ tests and Friv puzzles, but this is not fair — we are for a variety of genres.
