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11. Fatal error
The man is a lighthouse keeper, and the light he switches off is actually the lighthouse signal that warns ships away from danger. In the dark a ship is wrecked, killing people aboard.
This puzzle works because we make an assumption that a man going upstairs to bed is living in an ordinary double-storey house, with an ordinary light. To solve it, we have to look beyond the expected meaning of words and assumptions about how people live.
12. Going dotty
Follow the arrows:
This puzzle is great for visualisation skills and creative thinking. It requires us to look at things differently and literally “think outside the box” – most people won’t at first consider extending their lines into white space, outside the 3 X 3 grid of dots.
14. The memory palace
The mind palace technique – also called the “mental walk” or “method of loci” – uses the parts of our brains that deal with spatial learning and visualisation. Human beings are very, very good at memorising places and at storing visual information. Most of us are easily able to summon up, for example, a visual memory of a childhood home or neighbourhood, and imagine moving through it. The memory palace technique uses these skills to organise and remember new pieces of information, by linking them with a familiar space.
