Riddles can help sharpen the mind and learn new thought processes. Practicing riddles every day can help you think easier, remember better and stimulate your cognitive skills. Even the most challenging riddles can be solved by following these simple techniques.
Steps
Part 1 of 4: Learning how riddles work
Step 1. Learn the basic types of riddles
There are two of them: puzzles and puzzles. Both are posed as a dialogue between who asks the riddle (often the solution) and who answers.
- The puzzles are posed as problems, using metaphorical, allegorical or associative languages that require creativity and experience to solve. For example: "If the sun goes down, a flower garden; but if you look at it after dawn, an empty garden. What is it?" (Answer: heaven).
- The puzzles are posed as questions that integrate puns into the question, answer, or both. For example: "What is the fruit with rod and line?" (Answer: la pèsca / "pésca")
Step 2. Understand the rules of riddles
Most riddles have to do with familiar topics. The difficulty arises from the description of these topics. Riddles create associations that allow you to find the answer.
A very famous riddle, for example, taken from "The Hobbit" by J. R. R. Tolkien says: "Thirty white destrier / on a red hill / they beat and bite, / but no one moved." This riddle uses common images (horses, hills) to express in a way (in this case, "teeth")
Step 3. Be aware that riddles may be deceptive
Associations that seem logical could be false leads. The correct answer may be so trivial that you may not think about it.
- False leads are a widely used form of association deception, as you can see in this riddle: "A green man lives in the green house. A blue man lives in a blue house. A red man lives in the red house. Who lives in the red house. in the white house? " The immediate answer, given the proposed scheme, would be "a white man", but the "White House" is a red herring: the President of the United States lives in the White House!
- A traditional African riddle says: "How do you eat an elephant?" (Answer: one bite at a time). This riddle is a good example of an answer hidden in plain sight.
- The other "riddles" are not true riddles. This traditional Yiddish riddle goes: "What's hanging on the wall, is it green, wet and whistling?" The answer is a herring, because you can hang a herring on the wall and paint it green. If the herring was freshly painted, it is wet. The joke is that, in fact, there is no solution to this riddle, because the herring does not whistle.
Part 2 of 4: Hone Your Analytical Skills
Step 1. Solve puzzles every day
Solving riddles requires a combination of the information you know with the new information presented by the puzzle. Like riddles, puzzles ask you to use information you already know and contextual clues to find original, often deceptive, answers. Puzzles can help you recognize patterns and order.
- Puzzle games like Tetris, in addition to traditional board puzzles, require you to look at a situation from multiple angles to find the best solution. This process also carries over to solving riddles.
- Some specific types of puzzles and games are best for developing certain skills. For example, if you do a lot of crosswords, you will probably become very good at crosswords, but you may not improve as well in other areas. It will be helpful for you to try out many games instead of focusing on just one.
Step 2. Regularly alternate brain games
The longer you repeat a certain type of activity, the less effort your brain will have to exert. Regularly switching between game types will help keep your brain from getting used to taking shortcuts.
Step 3. Try reading and then summarize something complex
You could, for example, read a complex story in the newspaper and then write a short summary that summarizes all the main ideas in a few sentences. Research suggests that this will help you look at the "big picture" and not just the details, a skill that can be useful for solving riddles.
Reframing ideas in your own words can also help you develop language flexibility and improve memory. It's easier to remember ideas when you've taken the time to paraphrase them, because your brain has had to work to structure the ideas to understand them
Part 3 of 4: Practice the Riddles You Know
Step 1. Do a reverse engineering operation on some famous riddles
You may find it helpful to start with some riddles that you already know the answer to. There are many collections of riddles on the internet and in books that you can use for practice.
Step 2. Go back to the solution and try to understand how the riddle works
Riddles tend to assume that the answer is already known; part of the fun of a riddle is trying to fool a person by asking them a question about something they don't know they know. While submitting the application can be misleading, the solution is often something familiar.
A famous riddle in Sophocles' tragedy "Oedipus and the King" reads, "What goes on on four feet in the morning, on two feet in the day, and on three feet in the evening?" The answer is "man": a child crawls as a child (morning), walks as an adult (day) and uses an old man's cane (evening)
Step 3. Start breaking the riddle into parts
With the Oedipus riddle, a good starting point could be the "feet", as the word repeats itself in the riddle. What has four feet? What has two of them? What has three of them?
- What has four feet? Many animals have four feet, so this is a possible answer. The tables and chairs also have four feet and are also common objects, so they should not be overlooked.
- What has two of them? People are an obvious choice in this case, because men are familiar and have two feet. Tables and chairs don't have two feet, so they're probably not the answer.
- What has three of them? This is the tricky part. Animals usually don't have three feet if they haven't lost one. But if an animal started with two feet and then had two, it would not be able to regrow a third. This probably means that the third foot is some kind of tool - something that has been added.
- Who uses the tools? Man is the most trivial answer, so it should be the right one.
Step 4. Think about the actions in the riddle
There is only one verb in this puzzle, "proceed". So we know that whatever the solution is, it is able to move.
This "could" indicate that it is moving from an external push (like a car), so don't jump right into an answer. Keeping an open mind is important for solving riddles
Step 5. Consider the other information available to you
The other piece of information in the Oedipus riddle is the problem of time. The riddle reports "morning", "day" and "evening" as the timing of the actions.
- Since the riddle starts in the morning and ends in the evening, it seems likely that the riddle is related to something that happens over time from start to finish.
- Be careful not to think too literally when trying to solve a riddle. They are almost always allegorical; "day" doesn't necessarily mean 12:00, but rather the "middle" of something.
Step 6. Combine the actions of the riddle with your potential solutions
Now you can start narrowing down the possible solutions by eliminating the ones that aren't valid.
- Tables and chairs cannot "proceed" alone. This makes them invalid.
- A man has two feet, he can "add" one using tools such as sticks and crutches, and he can "go on". Even if you don't immediately understand the connection between feet and time, "man" seems like a valid solution.
Part 4 of 4: Solving the Riddles
Step 1. Try to figure out what kind of riddle you are dealing with
Some riddles require creative math skills, such as this: "A barrel of water weighs 25 kg. What do you need to add to make it weigh 20 kg?" (Answer: one hole).
Although puzzles and puzzles often pose the riddle in the form of a question, puzzles are often more complex problems, while puzzles are simple questions
Step 2. Consider the possibilities
If a riddle is challenging, it may be helpful to break it down into several parts, as shown in Part 2.
Although breaking a riddle into several parts and considering all possible solutions may seem difficult and cumbersome at first, with practice it will become easier and faster
Step 3. Suspend judgment on the answer
One of the most important tactics when listening to or reading a riddle is not to jump to conclusions. To solve a riddle, you will need to consider the literal and potential meanings of the words.
For example, this riddle asks: "What gets wet more and more as it dries?" (Answer: a towel). Even if the action seems contradictory, a towel dries things up and gets wet in the process
Step 4. Be flexible when considering the answers
Try to think of different ways of interpreting the clues to the riddle. The puzzles in particular are often very allegorical, which means they use words with a literal meaning to convey a metaphorical message.
This riddle, for example, asks: "What has golden hair and is it in the corner?" The answer is the broom: the "golden hair" is the yellow sorghum and "stays" in the corner when not in use
Step 5. Be aware that in some cases the riddles are deceptive
This is especially common for riddles that are written to give the impression that they have an inappropriate or explicit solution. The possibility of multiple answers will cause hilarity at the parties.
The goal of a deceptive riddle is to push the one who tries to solve it to give the most "trivial" (and often the most explicit) answer. There are several answers, for example, to this riddle: "Men have it, it has five letters and starts with c and ends with o, and it can be lengthened, what is it?" In order to give the correct answer ("neck"), you don't have to stop at the first thing that comes to your mind, but think more flexibly
Advice
- Read many riddles. The more familiar you are with riddles in general, the better you will become at solving them.
- Be patient with yourself. The riddles are meant to be challenging. Not finding the answer to a difficult riddle doesn't mean you can't think logically or you're stupid.
- Come up with riddles! Creating your own riddle will help you understand how they work, and will help you understand how to analyze them in order to solve them.
