Illusion No More: The Answers to M’s Mental Challenge
Illusion answers, reveal yourself!
The Narrator here again. If you subscribe to our weekly newsletter, you’ve already met M, the mysterious puzzle-maker behind one of NPH’s favorite books, The Master Theorem: A Book of Puzzles, Intrigue and Wit. M’s back, with the solutions to the wickedly vexing visual tests of your mental vim below…
Dreamland Textures
My brain may be complicated but this Theorem isn’t.
The textures you see here are based on patterns that simply look like letters. For example, that first one which looks like stone steps kind of has a V-shaped vibe to it. That next one with feathers looks a lot like a whole bunch of bubbly, uppercase Es.
Keep going down the image and you’ll find that it spells VELVETY — a Nat King Cole song. A creme brulee. That satisfying feeling of catching the bad guy. The texture of my life.
The Eye of the Beholder
Remember how I said Renaissance masters’ eyes for detail were like magic? Well, the painting in this image is the classic School of Athens by Raphael, but modified to be a classic Magic Eye illusion (otherwise known to my lawyers by the unbranded term “autostereogram”).
These things can be tricky. To resolve all that visual noise into a picture, you need to bring your nose really close to it and stare as though you’re looking through the image. Then draw your face back slowly and a 3D image appears! Now, you may need to practice a few times on easier images, so look at a few online before coming back to here. I’ll wait.
Okay, ready?
Do what you just learned on this image, and you’ll see the answer, PERSPECTIVE, hovering in 3D above that Raphael painting most famous for its notable use of a Renaissance technique called perspective projection. The School of Athens was painted more than 300 years before the first photograph was printed. Doesn’t that put things into, shall I say…perspective?
Synesthesia
Use the rules I set out about how my synesthesia works to translate the phrase at the bottom of the image, “25 BACON BITS VANILLA 29 BROWNIES AND ALLSPICE 2,” into colors.
For example, I say that whole words appear the same color as their first letter, so BACON looks pink to me because B looks pink to me. You can see how the rest translate below.
You may also notice that all of the colors on my synesthesia chart appear more than once, which means some numbers and letters look exactly the same to me. For example, both B and E are pink, so the word BACON happens to look a lot like an E to me.
When you find the other letter that matches each color in the phrase, you get the solution to this Theorem: SWEET SMELLS.
This, of course, is a synesthetic phrase in its own right as it mixes the senses of both taste and smell. Do you smell bacon, or is it just me?
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