I know. You can see all the tragedy but also the triumphs. You can see it all in the history of ciphers. So I’m a big fan. It’s a fun book. This book is a collection of very clever puzzles. The author is mysterious and goes by the pseudonym M. Some are pictures, some are codes, and some are wordplay. One thing I love about them is that you have to use different types of thinking and solving techniques. One of my favorite puzzles is when you have to spot something that links a bunch of disparate objects or ideas. Finding patterns is the basis of science, it’s the basis of life. Here’s one with pictures, I’ll let you try and figure it out. That’ll be fun. What are these pictures of?

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To me, part of what I love about puzzles is that they fuel my curiosity and I’d say curiosity and gratitude are my two favorite virtues. My last book was about gratitude; this book is all about curiosity. Curiosity is what drives puzzlers. They’re like, ‘Why is it? What is it?’ There’s a great puzzler, Maki Kaji, who is called the godfather of Sudoku. He summarized puzzles in three symbols: the question mark, the forward arrow, and the exclamation point. The question mark is when you first see a puzzle, and you’re baffled; the arrow is the struggle for solutions, the exploration; and then the exclamation point is that aha moment. He said you have to embrace the arrow; you have to love the search. It’s a more poetic way of saying you have got to embrace the journey. So that’s another thing I love about puzzles, that search. Yes. I cast a very wide net of types of puzzles. My first love is crosswords and word puzzles. But there are also logic puzzles, Sudoku, and puzzle types I never even knew about but that are huge, like Japanese puzzle boxes. I was able to find these subcultures where people are obsessed with them, where it’s like a religion. They are as devoted to it as religious people are to their various denominations. What I loved was meeting people like Elonka, or the guy who solves the Rubik’s cube with his feet in less than 20 seconds. There are just so many characters who are delightfully weird and eccentric. It was so fun to explore not only the history of puzzles, but who these people are and why they love puzzles so much.

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Yes, the solution to this one is letter. Each group of pictures has a common theme. Together, they spell out a sentence, which then reveals the solution. I definitely got into puzzles through the words. I am a word nerd. Crosswords were my first love. I don’t know if you read the intro to my book, but a few years ago, I was the answer to a clue in the New York Times crossword puzzle. It was the highlight of my life. My wedding was pretty good, but this was the holy grail.

Logic Puzzles by Puzzle Baron Logic Puzzles by Puzzle Baron

Continue doing this for every clue you're given. Eventually you will have filled in enough X's and O's on the board that you will then be able to use simple logic to deduce the solution to the puzzle. For example, if A = B, and B = C, then A must equal C. Similarly, if A = B, and B =/= D, then A must not equal D. Over 750 questions and featured films include: Love, Actually, Home Alone, It's a Wonderful Life, Elf, The Grinch, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Scrooged, Bridget Jones's Diary, Harry Potter, The Holiday, Die Hard (yes) and many, many more! Lardone A, Liparoti M, Sorrentino P, et al. Mindfulness meditation is related to long-lasting changes in hippocampal functional topology during resting state: A magnetoencephalography study. Neural Plast. 2018;2018:5340717. doi:10.1155/2018/5340717 So first on your list is My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles by Martin Gardner. The publisher blurb suggests these are puzzles 9- to 12-year-olds can do so, hopefully, most people can manage them. Tell me a bit about this book.That’s a great introduction. Who doesn’t want to go and do hundreds of puzzles after hearing that? Which brings us nicely to the puzzle books you’re recommending. How did you set about choosing them? I read this book in college and I understood about 40% of it. I just looked at it again and maybe got up to 50% or 60%. It’s a dense book but it’s very playful. It’s hard to describe. It’s part history, part puzzles, and a lot of philosophy. His goal is to try to explain how a bunch of lifeless atoms can create consciousness. He uses all sorts of interesting metaphors. The atoms are like a colony of ants. The atoms in our brain are like meaningless letters, but you put them together and they gain meaning. There’s the idea that when you boil it down, some things are just axiomatic and don’t make sense except within the system. Part of the book is dialogues between Achilles and a tortoise. So it’s a very strange book but it’s full of delightful little nuggets. That’s right. It cast a certain shadow at noon on the equinox and if you dug there, you would find it. There was a scandal because the person who won might have cheated, they knew the author’s ex-girlfriend or something like that. Regardless, it’s a gorgeous book. I loved the idea of putting hints in a book that lead to a real treasure. The book spawned an entire genre of books called armchair treasure hunts, where people would hide things. There’s an American version called The Secret where the author buried 12 treasures around North America. Yuki A, Lee S, Kim H, Kozakai R, Ando F, Shimokata H. Relationship between physical activity and brain atrophy progression. Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2012;44(12):2362-2368. doi:10.1249/MSS.0b013e3182667d1d

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Logic puzzles come in all shapes and sizes, but the kind of puzzles we offer here are most commonly referred to as "logic grid" puzzles. In each puzzle you are given a series of categories, and an equal number of options within each category. Each option is used once and only once. Your goal is to figure out which options are linked together based on a series of given clues. Each puzzle has only one unique solution, and each can be solved using simple logical processes (i.e. educated guesses are not required). In the subtitle of your book, you mention the quest for the meaning of life. Is that because part of the reason we like doing puzzles is that it gives us a sense we’re getting closer to understanding that? It is too late in one sense. In another sense, it’s not because you can still play the puzzles online at thepuzzlerbook.com. They are fantastic. You don’t even need to buy the book, though I hope you do. It’s free entertainment because these puzzles are brilliant. They were written by a team of professional puzzle makers led by a man named Greg Pliska. They’re so weird and delightful. They’re puzzles about the history of puzzles, so you’ll learn about that too. As I said, I’m a huge fan of paradoxes and recursion. As part of my book, I helped create the most time-consuming puzzle ever made. It’s a mechanical puzzle. It’s got 55 wooden pegs which you have to turn in a certain way. To finish it, you have to turn the pegs 1.3 decillion times, which is an unimaginably huge number. If you turn one peg per second, the universe will run out of energy by the time you solve it. I loved the jigsaw chapter in your book. It was also interesting reading about riddles. When you think of The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, people are very attracted to them, but I’m not sure if they are as much part of our culture anymore.

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So words are my true love. But I grew to love all these other genres, including jigsaws, which I was very snobby about and looked down on. I was, ‘They’re not real puzzles.’ But I am a reformed jigsaw skeptic. I can officially say I am now a jigsaw lover. Which Christmas film do you love the most? Which Christmas film do you hate the most? What even counts as a Christmas film? Let’s go on to your next book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. This won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. Can you explain what it’s about and how it relates to puzzles?

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Even without the puzzles, I like the book for the writing alone. I love this line: “My preferred learning style has always been to jump off the cliff first and build a parachute on the way down.” I don’t agree with it. I think it’s a terrible life philosophy. But I love it. It’s so wittily expressed. M is a clever and funny writer. Yes, the record is 3.5 seconds. It’s just mind-boggling. I can’t even twist it twice in 3.5 seconds. They’re very literary. So Tolkien, Harry Potter. Jane Austen had a lot of riddles. They are perhaps the oldest type of puzzle, and they are incredibly cross-cultural. Any culture from any time period has riddles. I do think they do get a bit of a bad rap, especially compared to their cousin, the joke. Jokes are considered much cooler than riddles. Even if you look at Batman, Heath Ledger won the Oscar for playing the Joker, but the Riddler is not as exciting a character. They don’t call it a treasure hunt. They call it a ‘puzzle hunt.’ But it is very similar. Going to the MIT Mystery Hunt was one of the adventures in my book. It’s where I met the people who wrote the puzzles for my contest. It’s a crazy annual event. It’s like an ironman triathlon for nerds. It’s 2,000 of the smartest people you can imagine, who come to Boston to the campus of MIT and spend 72 hours solving about 150 of the hardest, most baffling puzzles you can imagine. It’s a team competition and the team that finds the penny on the MIT campus wins. Park DC, Lodi-Smith J, Drew L, et al. The impact of sustained engagement on cognitive function in older adults: the Synapse Project. Psychol Sci. 2014;25(1):103–112. doi:10.1177/0956797613499592I put that in there because it is the ultimate puzzle. How do we figure out why we’re here? I don’t want to spoil the ending, but I didn’t 100% figure out the meaning of life. I think part of the meaning of life is actually the search for the meaning of life. That may sound glib, but I truly believe it. Curiosity and looking for the meaning—even if we never find it—is the meaning. That actually relates to one of the books that I recommended, Gödel, Escher, Bach, which is all about recursion and paradox. I love that stuff. So yes, to me, part of the meaning of life is trying to solve the puzzle of the meaning of life. But I will say I gained respect for riddles because they can be poetry. It’s not just about solving the puzzle. They can be these extended metaphors that make you see life in a different way. Let me just read you one of my favorites. It’s from The Hobbit by Tolkien and I think it’s a lovely little bit of poetry.