Games as Diagnostic Tools?

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There’s a lot of misinformation out there about the connection between puzzles/games and brain health.

If you’re a puzzle fan, no doubt you’ve seen the onslaught of ads about “brain fitness,” “brain training,” and all sorts of promises about memory help and staving off Alzheimer’s, dementia, and other cognitive conditions.

A casual Google search will turn up dozens of articles online arguing both sides. And so much of the data is inconclusive at best.

But!

There are absolutely benefits to playing puzzles and games in very specific circumstances:

  • Tetris has been used by researchers to help people suffering from traumatic flashbacks, a type of post-traumatic stress.
  • The University of Exeter conducted a study involving more than 19,000 participants that concluded that adults age 50 and older who regularly solve puzzles like crosswords and Sudoku have better brain function than those who do not.
  • An article from Scientific American discussed how crossword solving engages the episodic buffer, one of the mechanisms related to our working short-term memory, our ability to temporarily hold information while performing cognitive tasks.
  • Jigsaw puzzle solving can induce a mental state similar to dreaming, one that helps with stress, relaxation, and mood.

The latest exciting possibility of a connection between puzzles/games and health comes from a publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which reports that playing a three-minute video game has proven effective in identifying patients with depression based on anhedonia.

Anhedonia is the loss of the ability to enjoy things you would normally find pleasure in. Basically, the goal post of “enjoyable” moves, meaning something you previously enjoyed no longer results in the same good feelings it did.

And when you consider that anhedonia is present in an estimated 70 percent of patients with major depression issues, you can see how devastating anhedonia’s moving goal posts would be for someone already struggling with depression.

So how does this game work as a diagnostic tool?

The game challenges the player to collect the most apples from a series of digital trees. With each round of harvesting, fewer apples fall from the tree, and at some point, a player will move on to the next tree.

That moment, that decision point, is where the researchers are focusing their diagnostic attention:

The researchers asked 120 game players—50 diagnosed with major depression and 70 who were not—to compete to collect the most apples falling from digital trees. Researchers use such foraging tasks because reward-seeking circuitry, especially regarding something that looks like food, has been engrained in the mammalian brain by evolution.

And it turns out that the subjects who were previously diagnosed stopped taking pleasure in the game 50 percent sooner than non-diagnosed players.

While the non-diagnosed players would often stick with a tree until its yield dropped to 5 apples, those diagnosed with depression abandoned one tree for the next while the yield was still 8 or 9 apples.

Yes, like most diagnostic tests, this game will probably prove less effective as knowledge of it grows, but it remains a valuable option for researchers.

Dan Iosifescu, MD, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, elaborates on that:

Depression is increasingly thought of as an umbrella term that may include several distinct conditions… Measuring reference points may help us identify a specific subtype of depression linked to anhedonia, clarify its disease-causing brain computations, and tailor treatments.

And we may be able to do this remotely by asking patients, rather than traveling repeatedly for in-person visits, to spend a few minutes per week playing a smartphone game that lets us quickly adjust their treatment.

Greater accessibility of testing is definitely a good thing (although at the moment, the game is not publicly available to try).

Here’s hoping this game and others like it can be used to get specialized help to those who need it.

Do you find certain games and puzzles therapeutic, fellow puzzler? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.

That One Puzzle That Means a Little Bit More…

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A year ago yesterday, my friend Maureen passed away unexpectedly.

We didn’t get to see each other much, given that I live in CT and she lived in North Carolina. But we chatted online when life allowed, and it was always a treat when I would see one of her texts or posts pop up.

Mo and I bonded over bad movies, a shared love of writing and performing, and Brak’s “I Love Beans” song from Cartoon Planet.

And she was forever baffled and interested by the fact that my day job is puzzles.

She was immensely supportive and creative, encouraging me in all my endeavors (successful or not), and every year at Christmastime, she would send something she thought would inspire my creativity.

One year it was rubber ducks to decorate, complete with markers AND clip-on accessories like hats and mustaches.

The Christmas before she died, she sent me a puzzle box.

It has four simple wooden mechanical puzzles, including a fit-the-pieces-in-the-box puzzle and a star puzzle.

I rarely take them apart and reassemble them, since I already know the technique behind each. But I often find myself handling them, reflexively rolling one in my hand or running a finger along the edge as I’m working on something.

I’m sure these would work marvelously as fidget objects. I use them to idly engage myself while processing things. I find it more inspiring than simply staring at the computer screen or the blank page while I’m puzzling.

(There’s an IT person at my office who does the same with a Slinky while he’s coding or unraveling a programming issue.)

So many puzzles, however enjoyable, are just brief (or extended) bits of fun. I solve them, and put them aside, happy to have challenged myself but ready for the next a-ha moment.

Unlike all those, this puzzle set sits on my desk, patiently waiting for the next moment when I’m flummoxed or my editing stalls out. Just like my friend, they’re ready to help me out of the next jam.

A little piece of wooden inspiration in the palm of my hand.

Thank you for that gift, Mo.

Do you have a puzzle or a game you associate with a loved one? Did a loved one introduce you to the world of puzzles and games? I would love to hear your story, if you’d care to share.

Celebrating Mystery Science Theater 3000 with a Special Crossword!

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At this point, Mystery Science Theater 3000 is a comedy institution.

This simple idea — a man and his robot pals watching movies with the audience and gleefully poking fun at them — has spanned decades and generations.

And it’s been a good year for MST3K fans.

Not only has a copy of the last lost episode of the show been found — the KTMA-era version of Star Force: The Fugitive Alien 2,” which hasn’t been available since its original airing in November of 1988 — but the RiffTrax team of Bill Corbett, Mike Nelson, and Kevin Murphy have successfully crowdfunded a new quartet of episodes, MST3K: The RiffTrax Experiments.

A glimpse of the new set!

Over the years, this show has gone from local cable to Comedy Central, then to the Sci-Fi Channel. It left terrestrial cable for a while, until crowdfunding resurrected it. Then it streamed on Netflix, and moved to its own private streaming platform (The Gizmoplex, which is sadly shuttering soon). Along the way, it has toured with live shows, inducted new hosts and new robot voices into the cast, and now has constant livestreams running on YouTube.

It has spawned spinoffs like The Film Crew, Cinematic Titanic, and most famously RiffTrax, and new generations of fans are continuing to discover the show. (Plus a very lucky few joined the writing crew in some of the latest seasons.)

And new episodes on the horizon aren’t the only reason to celebrate.

Today marks the start of Halfway to Turkey Day!

Thanksgiving marathons have been an MST3K tradition going back to the ’90s, and the Turkey Day Marathon is so beloved that fans simply can’t wait until November to celebrate.

So Halfway to Turkey Day was born. A marathon of all the previous Turkey Day events, Halfway to Turkey Day starts today and will run through June 2nd. It’s available on Amazon Prime Video, Tubi, RokuChannel, the CW app, plus Samsung, LG, VIZIO and Google Smart TVs and more.

And I’ve been working on a puzzle celebrating Mystery Science Theater 3000, so what better day to share it than today, I ask you?

I hope all of the MSTies out there delight in a puzzly little journey through the history of one of my all-time favorite TV shows.

(Click here to download a PDF of the puzzle.)

I’ve tried to make it as inclusive as possible, so no matter who your favorite host is or what your favorite episode is, there should be something for you to enjoy. (Plus I couldn’t resist coloring in a few black squares when I spotted Gypsy/GPC in the grid.)

Happy puzzling, MSTies! And Happy Halfway to Turkey Day!

[Thank you to Jennifer Cunningham, Troy Bond, and Crossword Gentleman Doug Peterson for your testsolving and input!]

Raccoons Solving Puzzles For the Love of the Game!

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f you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ve no doubt noticed that one of our favorite topics is puzzle-solving animals. In the past, we’ve discussed examples of puzzle solving in cats, dogs, crows, cockatoos, octopuses, bees, pigs, squirrels, and wolves.

And today we’re excited to invite another critter into the pantheon of puzzle-capable creatures: Raccoons! ChatGPT might not be allowed to talk about raccoons anymore, but we at PuzzCulture sure can!

Raccoons have a reputation for being wily, particularly in folk tales, fables, and stories. They’re mischievous and sly, with forepaws advanced enough to allow them grab things and manipulate them. In suburban and urban environments, it’s hardly uncommon for raccoons to open garbage bins or find their way into other spaces in search of food.

So naturally, that raises some interesting questions: how far can their dexterity take them? What level of complexity can they unravel if properly incentivized?

In essence, how puzzly a challenge is too puzzly for a hungry, sufficiently-motivated raccoon?

As it turns out, raccoons will continue puzzling even when the food is gone!

Researchers Hannah Griebling and Dr. Sarah Benson-Amram challenged a sample group of raccoons to deal with a custom puzzle box. It had nine different potential points of access, which required manipulating knobs, sliding doors, latches, and other mechanical obstacles. (These entry points were grouped by the researchers into easy, medium, and hard categories for the purposes of their study.)

The raccoons were given 20 minutes in each trial to find a way into the box in order to retrieve the single marshmallow inside.

The raccoons proved dexterous enough to unravel most of the challenges in front of them, and the researchers’ difficulty rankings didn’t seem to matter:

The time spent interacting with the puzzle box overall was similar for Easy and Hard solutions, rather than being a clear gradient from Easy to Medium to Hard. This result does not support an effect of presentation order of the difficulty conditions as we would expect the total interaction time with the puzzle box to decrease along an Easy to Hard gradient if this were the case and the raccoons were only learning the simple rule that the MAB [the puzzle box] only ever supplied one food reward.

Not only that, but the raccoons continued opening the other access points and solving the other mechanisms after eating the single prize inside. The raccoons kept puzzle-solving without food as a motivation.

“We weren’t expecting them to open all three solutions in a single trial,” said Griebling.

They were in it for the love of the game!

Well, sorta.

This behavior, this intrinsic motivation — the raccoons being driven to continue solving the various mechanisms in front of them WITHOUT hunger as the primary motivator — is known as “information foraging.”

Essentially, they’re practicing and learning to become better puzzle solvers.

As the researchers stated in their report:

Information foraging in raccoons increases the likelihood of raccoons finding and ‘solving’ novel raccoon exclusion devices, such as bungee cords used to strap down garbage bin lids. This could lead to a ‘cognitive arms race’ between humans and raccoons, as has been recently documented in urban-living, sulphur-crested cockatoos, Cacatua galerita.

…

Wild raccoons are likely to show similar patterns to the captive raccoons in this study, given that they have willingly engaged with and solved multiple novel problem-solving tasks in the field and showed similar results to captive raccoons on a previous MAB study.

Oh yes. Raccoons are engaged in Olympic-level training to be even sneakier and more efficient. Those adorable trash bandits are out in the field, putting in the work, learning and developing new strategies to nab your snacks and food stashes.

Image courtesy of MeganForrestArt.

Okay, it’s not as organized as all that. But yes, raccoons do solve puzzles they don’t have to, and appear to be learning from the experience.

The study determined that raccoons did prefer some of the easier, more reliable methods for accessing the box — in the same way that you would probably go with a tried-and-true solution to a problem, rather than trying out a new technique with an unknown success rate. This trade-off of curiosity versus risk mirrors decision-making frameworks in humans, as well as other animals, according to Griebling. This is known as an “exploration-exploitation trade-off.”

So, we have definitive data. Raccoons will puzzle-solve without food as a motivator. (I know many puzzle enthusiasts who are the same way. They’ll tackle a puzzle just to learn from it, to see if they can unravel it. Though I wonder if marshmallows would motivate them as well…)

Are you hungry? Hungry enough to solve this acrostic?

But this does raise one last question: why test this at all?

As it turns out, the reasons are two-fold.

“Understanding the cognitive traits that help raccoons thrive can guide management of species that struggle, and inform strategies for other species, like bears, that use problem-solving to access human-made resources,” said Griebling.

Studies like this help us understand the development of already puzzle-savvy animals, but also helps us to understand what animals (both wild and captive) are capable of, making US better stewards of the environment and its many denizens.

And we get to add another species to the ever-growing list of creatures that are capable of puzzle solving.

Which brings me to my latest business venture: Raccoon escape room, anyone?

What’s your favorite puzzle-solving creature, fellow puzzlers? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.

A Criminal Crossword Conspiracy From 1959!

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During my extensive dive into crossword history in preparation for my Braille Crosswords post, I encountered all sorts of curious tidbits and trivia about crosswords. I tucked many of them away at the time, looking forward to digging into them properly later once the piece was completed.

So, with that post done and dusted, I had some time to pour through those tidbits and trivia for blog post ideas. And I knew I had to start with this snippet from The Omaha World-Herald on Sunday, July 22nd, 1979:

Portland: February 23, 1959. Two Oregon daily papers cry “Doublecross!” Charging that their crossword contests are being “fixed” by a “nation-wide ring” headquartered in Detroit, they discontinue the contests and call in the FBI

A criminal crossword ring? Tell me more about these cruciverbalist ne’er-do-wells!

I mean, we’ve discussed criminal activity and crosswords in previous posts, but those were strictly of the fictional variety. This story, on the other hand, is an honest-to-Shortz crossword criminal conspiracy, concocted nearly 70 years ago.

Our story begins in Oregon, where publisher William W. Knight of The Oregon Journal shared his suspicions in a front-page editorial piece on February 23rd, 1959.

The Oregon Journal and The Portland Oregonian were just two of the many newspapers around the United States who ran crossword contests with cash prizes. Subscribers would send their solutions to the paper in the hopes of being the first correct solver (or sometimes, the correct solver chosen at random) and winning some money.

But Mr. Knight reported that his sources at The Oregon Journal had uncovered something peculiar. They had learned about two previous Portland winners who only kept part of their money, the rest being forwarded to an intermediary, and after that to the suspected ringleader in Detroit, Michigan.

One woman won $2600 but retained only $300. $150 went to the intermediary, and $2150 to Detroit. Another winner received $2950 but he only kept $950 and sent the rest to a “tipster” in Detroit. (Geez, even when committing the same crimes, women are still getting paid less than men!)

Knight referred to this conspiracy as a “fix and tipping” scheme.

She’s got the acrosses, now she just needs the downs to really complete the crossword look.

“Fix” in this case means illegally rigging the outcome of the crossword contest, and “tipping” means that someone was informing the “contestants” of the solution in order to guarantee a win.

But the two primary distributing syndicates — Superior Features Syndicate, Inc. and General Features Syndicate — claimed this was impossible, calling their precautions “foolproof.”

These “foolproof” precautions basically meant that the puzzle grid and clues went to subscribing newspapers, but the puzzle solution went to an associated bank “or some other unimpeachable agency.” That bank/agency would hold the solution until the contest submission deadline had passed, and then release it to the subscribing newspapers.

(This is obviously pretty foreign to modern solvers, who are accustomed to seeing the previous day’s solution published alongside today’s new puzzle.)

Despite the reassurances of the distribution syndicates, Knight had already reached out to the FBI with his suspicions, and declared that The Oregon Journal would no longer be participating in crossword puzzle contests.

His editorial went out on February 23rd, and the next day, other papers began reporting on Knight’s alleged criminal crossword conspiracy.

But the Crossword Ring’s reign of terror would be short-lived.

One month to the day that Knight’s accusations hit the front page, J. Edgar Hoover himself announced the arrest of those responsible for the Crossword Ring conspiracy.

The headline in The New York Times the following morning read “12 SEIZED BY F.B.I. IN CONTEST FRAUD; 2 in Canada Also Accused of Being in a Ring That Got Puzzle Answers.“

Knight’s suspicions were correct, but the conspiracy ranged far wider than Portland and Detroit. The actual ringleaders were based in Ontario, Canada, and they telephoned answers to agents in Chicago, Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and Minneapolis as well.

So, how did the ringleaders get around those “foolproof” precautions we heard about before?

In staggeringly simple fashion.

The scam worked like this:

Step One: Set up a fictitious bank, Middlesex Trust Co., complete with a fake mailing address.

Step Two: Subscribe to the puzzle distributors in the name of a nonexistent newspaper company, Suburban Publishers, Ltd.

Step Three: Receive the puzzle solutions from the Syndicate via the fictitious bank’s P.O. Box, then contact agents in the United States to submit perfect solutions to their local papers before most other newspapers would’ve even published the contest puzzle.

All it took to circumvent the “foolproof” precautions was Step One.

The Crossword Ring had raked in $45,000, which is equivalent to over half a million dollars in 2026. And the FBI operation to arrest them all took only 86 minutes.

Amazingly, this wasn’t the end of crossword contests in the United States.

Despite further allegations of wrongdoing throughout the 1960s — including bribery and extortion — the contests remained popular, and prize amounts collected by contest entrants kept rising. One New York contest winner received a cash prize of $44,000, nearly the same amount that the Crossword Ring had scammed from newspapers over the course of weeks.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to my brand-new newspaper venture, The PuzzCulture Tribune Gazette Times-Herald-Daily. More about our crossword contests soon! *a-wink*

So, fellow puzzler, what’s your favorite crossword crime, fictional or otherwise? Let us know in the comment section below! We’d love to hear from you.

NBC’s Wordle Game Show is Looking for Contestants!

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Wordle is a household name.

There have been board game adaptations, dozens of variations (including four games at a time, eight games at a time, and Absurdle, where the word changes based on your early guesses).

After five years of public gameplay and hundreds upon hundreds of five-letter words, NBC is bringing the puzzle to television in a team game-show format.

From their official casting announcement:

We are casting teams of THREE PLAYERS to compete for a chance to win a HUGE CASH PRIZE!

TEAMS CAN BE MADE UP OF FRIENDS, FAMILY, SIGNIFICANT OTHERS, CO-WORKERS, ETC.

Selected teams will head to Europe to play the game over a 1-2 week period within July 20 – August 1, 2026 (dates subject to change). Must be 21+.

Was “Wordwide” intentional wordplay or a lucky accident?

They’ve already announced a host, Today Show co-host Savannah Guthrie, who is an avid Wordle player, and the show is being produced by Jimmy Fallon’s production company Electric Hot Dog, alongside Universal Television Alternative Studio and, of course, The New York Times.

Naturally, savvy game show fans are already drawing parallels between this proposed Wordle game show and Lingo, a word-guessing game show from 1987-1988. The game was basically Wordle, but each word you spelled gave you chances to draw bingo balls in order to fill out a bingo card.

OLD LINGO? Twenty years ago is OLD?! Man, the Internet is humbling…

Lingo had a very successful revival on the Game Show Network from 2002 to 2007, hosted by Chuck Woolery and lasting 345 episodes! It was briefly revived again in 2011 with Bill Engvall as host, and once more in 2023 with RuPaul as host, trying to capitalize on Wordle’s popularity.

There are currently versions of Lingo in Greece, Turkey, and the UK, and previous versions in another dozen or so countries.

But game shows are constantly being rebooted, adapted, and resurrected for our entertainment, so I’m not surprised to see Lingo return under its more famous sibling moniker.

The real question is… who is gonna pick the words for the show? Because Tracy Bennett has been doing a heck of a job for The New York Times for years now.

What do you think, fellow puzzlers? Will you be accepting the team challenge of NBC’s Wordle? Do you think this concept has staying power? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.