PT Puzzle: Square One

The visuo-spatial puzzle at right is trickier than it looks, designer Scott Kim warns: "The answers are right in front of you, but they're easy to overlook." Test your skills, following along for hints and insights on how you're exercising your gray matter as you complete this challenge. After all, it's hip to be sharp.

Be systematic: Create a method (spawning from your frontal lobe, the brain region involved in attention and planning) for adding up squares and rectangles; Kim uses a left-to-right, top-to-bottom approach.

Your parietal lobe, the brain's visual powerhouse, works overtime as the outlines of squares and rectangles seem to jump out at you, explains neuroscientist Richard Restak, who coauthored The Playful Brain with Kim.

Catch yourself poking at the shapes with your finger or pencil? Smart move: "The more sensory avenues you bring into it, the more learning you're doing," Restak adds. Incorporating motion and touch may spark a new engram, a shift in neural tissue that essentially embeds a memory in the brain.

Keep counting! You're tapping the frontal lobe to ignore the colors and to see a square or rectangle that's subdivided into orange, red, and green as a single unit. That's the same skill—suppression—that helps you block out distractions, like noisy construction outside your office window. "We live in an era when it's difficult to build up strong attentional powers amidst distractions," Restak says. "That's the rich power of puzzles—they force you to focus." —Andrea Bartz