What bulb would best represent your brain’s insight? For me, this morning, this is it. Image: Flickr/aesop
Here’s a test: Did you analyze your way to this week’s solution, scrolling through possible answers in an organized way while trying to match possibilities to the three starting terms? Or did you sit tight and wait for the whallop of insight to strike? The difference is telling and affects your chances of love, family and career success in the New Year. Or maybe it doesn’t. I mean, this isn’t Cosmo after all. Sheesh.
In any case, this week’s puzzle was a smattering of remote association puzzles — what one word melds with the three given words to make a compound word or common phrase? Here were the answers:
1. show/life/row: BOAT
2. fox/man/peep: HOLE
3. jumping/bag/string: BEAN
4. mate/list/blank: CHECK
5. fleet/shooting/wars: STAR
6. camp/re/lace:BOOT
7. lace/horse/horn: SHOE
8. game/out/water: BOARD
9. fiction/mad/geek: SCIENCE
10. tom/toy/oh: BOY
This also illustrates one of the possible pitfalls of psychological testing: the potential to conflate skill with culture. Do you, dear geek, think the readers of this blog were perhaps more likely than the population median to jump to the answers STAR, BOARD and SCIENCE? In this case it makes us seem especially insightful.
And the most insightful among us this week — or, at least the one among us who was perfectly insightful and also lucky enough to be pulled from this week’s cornucopia of correct entrants — is Ian! Congrats on your $50 gift certificate from ThinkGeek! Thanks to all for playing the puzzle and don’t forget to tune in on Monday when Judd continues our great tradition of eclectic brain goodies with another installment of POTW.
