The brain regions involved in these complex thought processes are mostly known through MRI research (Ashlesh et al., 2020, Sinitsyn et al., 2020). While playing a game, you actually send a lot of stimuli to your brain, forcing it to work hard. The prefrontal cortex, the brain area located in the front part of your head, responds positively to these stimuli, as this part needs challenge and likes to be stimulated by new problems to solve. Because the brain gets more contact points and communicates more with each other (more electrical signals between nerve cells in a network) while playing, blood flow increases and you keep the brain active. All reasons to play more games.

While playing games, your brain is hard at work. Your brain is cracking as you search for the answer, which you know will come to you at any moment. Actually, this is the creative process of problem solving. 'Aha!' You have found the answer and achieved the "Aha!" moment! Researchers are also looking at what happens to the brain when you experience an "Aha!" moment (Sarathy, 2018). It turns out that creativity and insightful problem solving is different from analytical problem solving, where you look for the answer incrementally in logic. Thus, in analytical problem solving, you are limited by cognitive load, which means as much as "the more mental processes you are engaged in, the slower the problem solving goes" (Stuyck et al., 2022). Whereas in insightful problem solving, you don't suffer from this. It was previously seen as a mostly internal process that takes place in the brain itself with little influence by outside information.

Solving everyday problems is slightly different. You cannot always solve these problems analytically because there is often no step-by-step plan. Imagine you want to unscrew something but you don't have a screwdriver, using a coin is then a creative solution. So it is necessary to tackle this with insight and creativity. In daily life, we often solve many problems unconsciously, as well as consciously. Usually this goes all at once. You run out of sugar for your recipe so you use some honey, you forgot to bring shower gel on vacation so you use shampoo to wash yourself with, your charger is lost so you text your neighbor if you can borrow his, and on top of that you think hard about the issue at work. These kinds of problems are often not well-defined and more often have open-ended solutions. After all, one solution may cause another problem or only work temporarily. This adds a level of uncertainty that may in turn affect your plan of action. During the process of searching for a solution, you often experience dozens of micro-discoveries that add up to the solution.

Problem solving in the "real world" is a rather messy process that requires a close interaction between problem solving, creativity and insight. For example, solving problems during games is often a little nicer for your brain, because this involves less uncertainty (and more fun). For either way of problem solving, though, there are handles to help your brain. For example, you may suddenly get a good idea if you step away from the problem or puzzle for a moment (incubation) or it helps to take your mind off it and think of something completely different (unconscious thinking). So are you getting stuck during a game? Distract your brain by playing a completely different game, taking a walk around or chatting with a colleague or supervisor.