How Wooden Puzzles Help Dancers and Musicians Improve Their Craft

On the surface, wooden puzzles, dance, and music have little in common. But that’s when we are looking at them from the outside. 

On the inside, wooden puzzles, dance, and music boil down to math. Sequential thinking, visual/spatial thinking, creative solutions. 

Let me explain each term in more detail.

Sequential thinking refers to thinking in an orderly progression. From basic to complex or from start to finish. For dancers and musicians, this means breaking down the music into phrases, into beats, and analyzing what happens in each one. For puzzlers, sequential thinking means analyzing the individual pieces, finding the basic starting point, and looking to see what the next step is, increasing in complexity as the puzzle progresses.

Visual/spatial thinking refers to viewing an entity as a whole, seeing the complexity rather than the steps. For dancers and musicians, this means the feeling they are trying to convey, the theme of their piece. For puzzlers, visual/spatial thinking means grasping how the pieces fit together to create the wooden puzzle’s finished form, without necessarily realizing how each piece got to where it is now.

Creative solutions refer to combining the facts or ideas at hand in new ways. It is a combination of sequential thinking, visual/spatial thinking, and more, to bring someone to a new conclusion. For dancers and musicians, this is essential to their craft. Delivering a message through their medium in a unique way is what dancers and musicians strive for. For puzzlers, creative solutions are a way of life. Wooden puzzles can be solved numerous ways, and when hitting a dead end, the puzzler reassess, backtracks, and tries a new direction.

Manipulating wooden puzzles helps the mind of a dancer and musician strengthen the sequential and visual/spatial thinking in order to be able to reach creative solutions almost naturally. Sequential thinking is very much encouraged and strengthened in school. But visual/spatial thinking is sorely neglected, even discouraged, in school. Seeing the “big picture” of what they want to convey is essential to dancers and musicians, and I would encourage them to manipulate wooden puzzles often, especially wooden brain teasers. 

Anyone who wants to increase their creativity would be well served to play with wooden puzzles. Don’t even worry about reaching the solution. Just manipulating the puzzles to see what happens is a creative exercise in and of itself.