Three Thrilling Illusions to Solve
Do you have what it takes to decipher these mind-bending puzzles?
How good are you at solving illusions? Well, we’re about to find out. We made contact with a character calling themself “M”…and we’re not talking about James Bond’s boss. I’m talking about the mystifying illusion master behind one of the Boss’s favorite books, The Master Theorem: A Book of Puzzles, Intrigue and Wit. They are tasking you, reader, with three brain (eye?) teasers to solve.
Once you think you’ve got them figured out, find the answers here. I’m gonna hand it over to M now. Remember: nothing is as it seems…
A tap on the door in the deep of night.
A wax-sealed envelope slipped underneath.
A rustle inside and my quick escape. Detection avoided again — but just barely.
I’m M, or at least that’s how I’m known, and today in Wondercade, I’ll be your guide.
You know, NPH and I have a lot in common. We both fancy a good brandy. We’re both known by letters. We both recruit the world’s elite for our secret society by slipping cryptic messages in wax-sealed envelopes under their doors at midnight. Well, maybe that last one is just me. Want in? The Herculean test of your grit is as follows: Find the word or phrase solution to each one of my puzzles, called Theorems. Doing so will earn you entry into our elite ranks. It may take you some time, but trust me — it’ll be worth it.
The Eye of the Beholder
If you’re looking for something to add to your bucket list, I’ve got just the thing: Go visit the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy on a warm November day. The tourist season is over by then, so it’ll be just you, the locals and the paintings.
Ah, those paintings.
I love wandering those rambling halls, watching art history magically unfold before my eyes in room after room of masterworks dating as far back as the early 1200s.
The paintings that really capture my imagination, though, are those of the Renaissance artists. Call me a traditionalist, but works like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel and Raphael’s School of Athens are among the best ever produced. These Da Vinci-day Da Vincis managed to capture scenes with the depth and richness of photographs thanks to innovations in using geometry and color theory to create realistic tableaux.
Each Renaissance master had an eye for even the minutest details that magically transformed paint on paper into a living, breathing scene. Look at their paintings the right way, and you’d swear the subjects were popping out of the frames right before your eyes.
Synesthesia
Brains are weird. From the seemingly nonsense connections of my mind in the minutes before sleep to the way I perceive numbers and letters, my mind (and your mind, I’d bet) is a mystery.
For whatever reason, I strongly associate letters and numbers with specific colors. When I look at printed text, I don’t actually see the various colors — I know the text is black — but my subconscious immediately calls up the related color in my head. Sometimes that association is so strong that when I’m trying to remember some word or name, I can often recall the color of the word before the word itself.
This phenomenon, called synesthesia, is well-documented, but the actual text-color associations work differently for everyone. My associations are documented below, and my personal synesthesia seems to follow these rules:
- Whole words appear to me as the same color as their first letter
- Multi-digit numbers are beautifully multi-colored, as determined by their individual digits
Makes the whole world just a touch more colorful, you know?
Dreamland Textures
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Brains are weird. Take mine, for example. Between my synaesthetic association of letters with colors and my dreams about alternate dimensions, you never know what this crazy bundle of electrical firings is going to come up with next.
So, I’m here to share with you yet another bizarre entry in my attempts to document my brain. For as long as I can remember, smells, tastes — even emotions — forcefully bring to mind various textures. Fresh-cut grass smells spikey. Watermelon tastes fluffy. Happiness is distinctly glossy.
It’s related to my synesthesia, I’m sure, but it’s much more prominent when I’m on the edge of dreams. As I fall asleep, in addition to hearing the poetic mutterings of nonsensical phrases, vivid textures regularly flash before my eyes. Pink fur. Spiky metal. Smooth wood.
Much like how my dreams help me process my waking hours, these textures seem to represent my mindset at the time. If I focus on the textures for long enough, I bring the subconscious to the fore and can see what they’re trying to tell me. The coarser the texture, the more anxious I am. If they’re smooth and soft, I know I’m in a good headspace.
It makes me wonder: if I took everything that’s happened in my life, every emotion I’ve ever felt, all the awesome stuff I’ve done and heard and even eaten, what texture would represent the totality of me?
Head here to find the answers to M’s three illusions.
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