What is most important for solving puzzles?

[No brains]

Is imagination or logic more useful for solving puzzles? Are there qualities more important than those two?

[Grinner]

Albert Einstein said something to the effect that imagination is the most important thing anyone can have. While I tend to agree with that statement, certain sorts of puzzles do stress certain kinds of cognition more than others.

I think more abstract puzzles place greater emphasis on imagination. However, puzzles with more concrete elements require no tricky thinking, just plain brainpower.

[noparlpf]

Depends on the puzzle. Give me some puzzles. (Why, back in my day, every stranger you ran into had a puzzle for you. Man I am so glad I got a 3DS for Pokémon X/Y because now I can finally play the 3DS Professor Layton game.)

[warty goblin]

I do a fair amount of reasonably advanced mathematics. I find this sort of divide pretty nonsensical as a result. You can't get past square one in understanding, say, measure theory without the considerable application of both.

...maybe that explains why I'm so bad at measure theory.