From Linda Priestley, Editor-in-Chief
Every Saturday afternoon for the past six years, Liza, her long-time friend Gaby, and their spouses have sat together around a large table to work on a massive jigsaw puzzle. A 10,000-piece puzzle can keep the four young retirees busy for two months. Do they find that frustrating? “Never!” says Liza, who started the group. In fact, it’s just the opposite: the four dissectologists (the first jigsaw puzzles were called “dissected maps”) love working as a team and merrily teasing their brains for hours on end—trying to spot where a tiny bit of clover goes or hunting the one piece hidden among hundreds of others that will complete a mouse’s nose.
Since she was a child, Liza has loved this pastime, to which her grandfather, a mathematician, introduced her. Together they did countless jigsaw puzzles. “It’s good for developing reasoning and observation,” he told her. Later, the former philosophy professor did jigsaws with her children, both to strengthen family bonds and to stimulate their neurons. “It’s about remembering shapes, colours, and patterns and understanding spatial concepts,” Liza says. And then there’s strategy:
“Where to begin, how to proceed…. Is it better to start with the edges and work towards the middle or to tackle each corner before moving to the centre? When it comes to sorting pieces, what’s the most efficient approach? How do you avoid getting thrown off your game plan when you’re distracted by an irresistible piece that goes there, you’re sure of it. The beauty of doing jigsaw puzzles is that it teaches you to calm down, to let go when a piece doesn’t fit, to change strategy along the way, if needed. All this is good for the brain. And whatever your age, once the puzzle is done, the sense of pride and accomplishment is beyond compare.”
It’s not just Liza and her grandfather who testify to the benefits of jigsaw puzzles. One of the few serious studies on the subject, conducted in Germany in 2018 and published in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, showed that doing jigsaw puzzles regularly puts a variety of cognitive abilities to use and can help protect against stress, which is harmful to the health of brain cells.
Puzzling can also help you unwind or recharge. Our four Saturday puzzle pros use their weekly get-together to relax but also to chat and muse together about a better world. “Over the years, we’ve talked about everything: the pandemic, inflation, the climate—and Trump!” Liza says. If the current occupant of the White House is giving, a hundred years later, new meaning to the expression “the Roaring Twenties,” Liza and her group are getting through these topsy-turvy times by meeting the challenges together and in solidarity with one another, one puzzle piece at a time.
Want to Give It a Try?
You can find jigsaw puzzles everywhere: department stores, bookstores, pharmacies…some places even sell second-hand ones. You can also borrow them from your local library or search online to find puzzle-exchange groups in your neighbourhood.
