Can you connect tennis to fish? It’s not easy, I’ll give you that—the two ideas seem at odds. One is a game played by humans, the stuff of Wimbledon and Rebound Ace, while fish, well, swim in rivers and other places where tennis is hard to play. Keep pushing however, keep telling your brain a link exists, and you may just find one. Or several. Andy Murray, for instance, has a river for a surname, the same name ending with ray, a fish. Then there’s Pat Rafter—another surname suggesting rivers—who set up tennis schools across Australia, and fish are also found in schools. Tennis players need lines, a net, much like fishermen. And back in the noughties, a lanky right-hander named Mardy Fish ranked in the world’s top 100.
Approaching the problem from the other direction—trying to build a bridge between fish and tennis—we can make all kinds of leaps. To fish is to angle, and tennis is a game of angles. Then you have scales, precisely what the ranking system does, scaling the jackpot pool for the bigger fish in the pond, the Novaks and Serenas, all the way down to the minnows. And lastly there’s Pat Cash in his heyday—that chequered headband trying to control a 12-inch mullet.
So what? What’s the big deal if fish and tennis share a few overlaps? The world has bigger problems to fry. But I disagree. Few challenges in life toss you into the weird mode of thought, called ‘dissonance’ in clinical circles, where the brain seeks to reconcile the conflict of separate ideas.
This chapter will explore several surprising links between puzzles and agile thinking, probing an area that many cognition books overlook, namely the business of tying together, and untying. Of tasking your brain to fuse two notions as nimbly as the same puzzles oblige you to un-fuse them. To solve a cryptic clue in particular, you must refuse the lazy associations, and instead unlink and make new connections.
The practice is vital in multiple fields, from engineering to medicine, from art to IT, pursuits far removed from the puzzle page. Indeed, the history of invention is a tribute to fresh connections. Mentally, Philo Farnsworth leapt from a ploughed hill to the dissected field of cathode emissions, making way for the TV screen he’d create. Adolf Fick, a German GP, imagined the meniscus from an ear of corn as a concave cap for the retina, thus designing the contact lens.
As it happened, my own retinas were focused on Farnsworth’s telly when the tennis/fish dissonance landed on my lap. I was watching the Paris Open final in 2010, where Sam Stosur the Australian was playing the tournament’s seventeenth seed, Francesca Schiavone. Out of habit, I was barracking for the Aussie, but the Queenslander was being outsmarted, out-thought and out-angled by her Milanese rival. Initially I felt deflated, watching my compatriot flounder (hey, there’s another fishy link), until I saw the bright side.
The answer lay in SCHIAVONE, the surname. Can you see the fish in those letters? Why not release them into a random shoal?
Sitting on the couch, trying to stay awake, I spun the letters in my head and chanced on something succulent. I say chanced, but Louis Pasteur, another scientist and inventor was more of the opinion that, ‘Chance favours the prepared mind.’ In truth, my brain tackles these quirks all the time, finding anagrams and other curiosities in names and phrases. Like a tennis player’s forearm, my noggin is stronger for alphabetic drills as well as a craving to find connections. This is due to puzzles obliging the brain to build bridges between unlikely banks. It destroys bridges too, but let’s keep things constructive for the moment.
Have you netted the hidden fish? I refer to ANCHOVIES, those nine letters ready-made to occupy a crossword grid, so long as Schiavone could outlast Stosur in the final. That way, the Italian was assured sufficient fame to qualify for an anagram clue, assuming I could link the clue’s two domains—tennis and the ocean—in the subsequent clue.
If that makes no sense, let me explain. A core principle of crossword-setting is akin to marriage, unifying a clue’s two parts—the wordplay and the definition, or vice versa—so snugly you can’t detect the line of separation. Very soon Part Two will unlock the mechanics of cryptic puzzles in greater detail. For now, let’s just consider Schiavone as a perfect red herring, a scrap of mental bait that I could use to make an anagram clue, so long as I could match the tennis player (her name the letters you had to mix) with something fishy (the definition pointing to ANCHOVIES, the solution).
Drafting the puzzle, I tried to splice those elements into a fluent entity, that had my solvers thinking tennis (the wrong, lazy connection), and overlooking fish (the right one). To make that deception possible, I had to build a bridge in my own mind. With ANCHOVIES, the answer, I needed a tennis-y image to echo fish, or a fishy notion evoking tennis. Do this right and both parts would seem one unbreakable unit, leaving my solver at sea, unsure how to disjoin the elements. Something like this:
Net catches these Schiavone smashes (9)
Spot the trap? Talking all things tennis, I’m nudging your gaze one way, towards the court heroics in Paris, when really you should be pondering the sea. The craft is called misdirection, getting a solver’s brain to make a false association.
For the same reason, ‘cryptic’ the word derives from ‘kryptos’ in Greek, or ‘hidden’. Every puzzle, every clue, compels a solver to go seeking, if you like—to expose the phony link and forge the hidden one.
With this clue, you need to recognise Schiavone as a letter cluster, not a tennis player. You need to smash those letters—S, C, H, I, A, V, O, N and E—and next align your result to the ambiguous net that opens the clue.
That’s the cryptic art in a nutshell, for both setter and solver. The setter builds a diversion out of sly connections, while the solver’s challenge is twofold: to fracture the lie and then reconcile the two parts to reveal the answer. Call it a binary way of staying brainy.
CELEBRITY COCKTAILS
If SCHIAVONE hides ANCHOVIES, can you swirl the ten complete names here to make a single word each time? (The clue is in the brackets.) AL GORE, say, gives you GALORE or GAOLER—while PRESBYTERIANS congregate in BRITNEY SPEARS.
1. MEG RYAN (Eurozone?)
2. SOCRATES (Rudest or roughest)
3. MONA LISA (East African)
4. STEVE IRWIN (Q-and-As)
5. NICK PRICE (Alfresco feaster)
6. NOVA PERIS (Oozing through)
7. RED SYMONS (Medical conditions)
8. FATS WALLER (Cascades)
9. ISAAC STERN (Verifies)
10. BEN COUSINS (Boing-boing … ?)
ANSWERS:
1. Germany, 2. coarsest (plus coasters), 3. Somalian, 4. interviews, 5. picnicker, 6. pervasion, 7. syndromes, 8. waterfalls, 9. ascertains, 10. bounciness
That’s the buzz of crosswording, for both parties. But how will your brain conduct such contrary work—breaking and remaking? And what’s the net benefit of this whole fishy racket? Read on.
The art of re-seeing
Your brain knows how to apply the word ‘apply’. The verb crops up in legal clauses and shampoo labels all the time. The root is Latin, linking back to ‘applicare’, meaning ‘to connect’. Going one step further back, the stem is ‘plicare’, meaning ‘to fold’, giving us such cousins as ply and pliant, imply and complicated. Of course, you know all these words and how to use them, each stored in the folds of your brain.
But now look at the word again. Apply. Can you see the word from a different perspective? Look again, carefully:
A hint: consider a woman called Maria Ann Smith. She came to Australia in 1838, travelling from England to settle in outer Sydney. There she established an orchard where the first shoots of a promising new plant germinated, a green fruit that would soon bear her nickname: Granny Smith.
Apply. Do you now see the word anew?
Odds are the pioneer yarn has jolted your frame of reference. In a flash the familiar turns fresh, the ‘apply’ of legal clauses now a descriptor of Jonathans. If zest is lemony, why can’t a turnover be apply?
Linguist Geoffrey Pullum calls this category of word a ‘misle’, a playful backformation of ‘misled’. Coworkers, for instance, could be seen as those responsible for orking cows, the word allowing your brain to enter a new interpretation. Mothers in a different light could be insect collectors. Superbowl might describe an excellent hooter.
It’s all total nonsense, yet there’s a logic behind the gaffes, just as warbling might be deemed military medals, while misled rhymes with fizzled. Working with language in orthodox ways makes for orthodox brains. Muscles betray our lifestyle—from the oversized calves of the cyclist to the beer-lover’s paunch. In the same vein, our brains reflect our dominant mode of thinking.
Let’s meet Dr Debra Aarons, an academic at the University of New South Wales. Aarons specialises in generative grammar, a branch of linguistics that regards grammar as a mental system of rules that generates an infinite number of sentences. Pioneered by Noam Chomsky, generative grammar labels our inbuilt ability to process language as tacit knowledge of grammar. As infants, even before we can read we learn to grasp simple and compound sentences, understand the various parts of speech and the working rules of case and tense. Immersed in language, we cotton on to grammar long before we know the word itself.
But if we stick to that diet, neglecting to learn additional alternative languages—be they cryptic or Portuguese—our brain gets lazy. Neural pathways channel the same old traffic, and our input becomes as predictable as our cognitive responses.
In 2015, Aarons decided to examine this mindset. As part of her puzzle-flavoured paper called ‘Following orders’, the linguist investigated the impact of cryptic clues on mental pliancy. Clue by clue, the paper examined numerous cryptic formulas, and how they might influence our inner wiring. Rather than brain-mapping, or resorting to fMRI scanners, Aarons unpacked each recipe to test how their ludic—or playful—nature could spur the mind to process language in a different way.
We’ve already dabbled with anagrams, getting the neurons to juggle a tennis star into a pizza topping. But what about charade clues, wondered Aarons, a recipe that dismantles an answer into fragments. HEART, say, can be split into HE-ART, or possible HEAR-T, since single letters can also be detached. Answers to Aarons’ charade clues, from BALL-A-DEER to DI-SCOUR-AGE, show how the breakdowns preserve the whimsy of Pullum’s misles.
PENCHANT was another specimen cited by Dr Aarons, warranting the clue:
Oinking tendency?
Pigs oink. And pigs live in sties, also known as pens. Therefore a pen-chant could be viewed as oinking, or a chant escaping a pen.
Cheap trickery, you might argue, but Aarons has a different take: ‘In viewing language elements as pieces to be joined without regard for rules of linguistic structure and use, cryptic crosswords force solvers to work against their grammatical intuitions.’ Push hard enough, dismantle far enough, and fresh cognition will come: ‘Once we view language, especially written language, as a string of elements, the play and puzzle possibilities are endless.’
Thanks to cryptic language, or the warbling whimsy of misles, a word like penchant converts into an ambiguity your mind must decipher. Is heart an organ, say, or a reference to machismo paintings, the he-art your eye can also detect? Is sewer a drain or a seamstress? Equipped with a new way of thinking, your brain is obliged to play a momentary tug-of-war with itself, trying to rationalise the mixed signals on offer.
To appreciate that tension in the visual realm, look at the Necker cube below, an elegant mind-trap designed in 1832. With no orientation cues, your brain must determine whether A or B is closer to you.
Naturally the answer is either, depending on how you view the cube. Should you feel A is nearer, this would place that letter in the downward-pointing outer corner. Likewise, if you picked B as closer, that letter would occupy the upward-pointing outer corner, essentially flipping the cube in your mind’s eye.
The Necker cube is a shape-shifting paradox, realigning your neural path just as ‘penchant’, ‘mothers’ and ‘coworkers’ can be linguistic illusions, coaxing your brain to see two truths. Like Necker’s cube, only one orientation can be perceived in any given instant, a fleeting reality quickly disrupted by the alternative, and vice versa.
Whether visual or verbal, the bottom line is cognitive. Your brain can’t rely on tacit grammar any more than it can trust orthodox perceptions. Not all the time. The gist is dissonance, the constant flux of competing signals, where ovaries can mean eggs, or a coded description of monotony, yet never both at once. Optical illusions, like cryptic mischief, force the mind to flicker, to juggle and arbitrate, rather than doze in the usual monotony. As adults we deal with pragmatics—the rules of grammar, the roles of words—but with the cryptic ‘modality’ we can abandon the script.
Try Vlad’s clue from The Guardian:
Old police force’s making arrest (6)
The clue smoothly persuades you to think of law and order. Yet don’t be misled. Remember the tennis example. Change from a reader to a solver and decide where to disconnect the sentence.
Despite its judicial vibe, Vlad’s clue is more concerned with physics than civics. Not just a legal term, arrest is also a verb familiar to scientists when measuring momentum. Cast your mind back to your own days in your high-school lab, going through Newton’s laws of motion …
Or approach the answer from the opposite side. That’s a general tip for solving: if one end isn’t revealing the solution, try the other. Just as Necker’s cube can be reorientated, so too can a cryptic clue, this time by placing the old police force in the foreground. Does any old force spring to mind? Like ‘arrest’, ‘force’ can be a scientific term, but here the judicial context is the right one: we are indeed seeking a vintage cop squad, or maybe the force still exists. Who could tell? This force is secretive after all …
For the answer I suggest you travel back to Germany, when the wall was up and paranoia reigned in Berlin. The force’s official name was/is the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. Not that Vlad expects you to know that, but most solvers will recognise the service’s abbreviation, ‘Stasi’.
Almost there. Keep pushing. There’s one more connection to make.
No matter the genre, quick or cryptic, a crossword solution must mirror the case of the clue’s definition. Here in Vlad’s case the apostrophe does that duty, contracting the expression to read: old police’s force’s. STASI, therefore, isn’t your answer, since you too must mimic the clue’s grammar, converting the secret police into STASI’S. And look, the minute you close that gap, the cops disappear, morphing into STASIS, a synonym of arrest, but less in the cop sense, and more to do with monotony.
MISLEADING MISLES
Biped—past participle of bipe
Bookings—deplore royalty
Codify—to convert into a cod
Epitome—a large epi-pen manual
Menswear—they sure do
Nowhere—and later, somewhere else?
Pronouncement—the stuff that keeps you and I together
Putin—enter
Repaired—reunited
Sabotage—the era of wooden shoes
Therapist—sexual deviant
Tumbling—navel piercing
Unionised—amalgamated into a union
Weeknights—Camelot tots
To quote Dr Aarons, ‘When working with language as bits of code, puzzlers are thrown constantly onto their linguistic intuitions, and consciously have to fight against them.’
There’s the gauntlet at your feet: to unlock a cryptic puzzle, you need to foster a second instinct, to imagine the alternative and see the covert: just the sort of thinking that leads to the laboratory. And by laboratory, of course, I don’t mean lab-oratory.
Super solutions
There are inventions anywhere you look—from parachutes to pulsars, from GPS to DNA—with backstories vouching for the benefit of a brain leaping sideways. Look at books, say. We take them for granted, yet we owe their existence entirely to an inspired reverie in 1439, when a German silversmith named Johannes Gutenberg called by a vineyard. There he saw a large-scale wine press squashing grapes into juice, the fruit stomped flat between two metal plates—and he made a connection. What if, thought Gutenberg. What if you placed blocks of movable type along the lower plate? What if instead of grape juice there was ink?
Edward de Bono would label Gutenberg’s insight as a classic instance of lateral thinking. De Bono coined that phrase during the 1960s to describe a creative and indirect mode of problem-solving. We see it every time someone finds a novel use for an object, like a bush mechanic’s repair job, cutlery as jewellery, or the rebirth of tyres as flip-flops in Nigeria.
In a sense, our own brain flips, linking two ideas to forge one neat solution. Say you’re stuck in a hotel room with no iron for your shirt. A crafty guest might heat the room’s frying pan and improvise with its base. Don’t imagine that an iron, and only an iron, is the unique answer to your problem—that’s the trap of one-track thinking. Lacking X, a limited thinker will treat X as the single remedy.
Another trap, as de Bono has identified across his suite of ‘thinking’ titles, is the notion that any creative idea is logical in hindsight. When Gutenberg saw the grapes and visualised type-blocks, he was being creative—not logical. Of course, as you flick the pages of this book, or watch galley proofs rolling from a press, everything seems logical, where wineries paved the road for libraries as though it has always been. But that impression neglects the fact that most breakthrough solutions are the fruit of flexible minds.
Science journalist Steven Johnson calls it the ‘adjacent possible’. Described as an inventive mindset, the adjacent possible ‘captures both the limits and the creative potential of change and innovation’. In his book, Where Good Ideas Come From, Johnson typifies this tinkering approach as ‘hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself ’. Instead of being mired in the present—the room with no iron, the grid with no answer—the nimble thinker ponders what if.
Part of Johnson’s argument is how history’s greatest breakthroughs, from Ford’s Model T to Darwin’s evolution theory, are the climax of multiple eurekas over time. Gutenberg’s aha, he’d argue, did not occur in a vacuum. The silversmith had long been grappling with the printing problem, testing ideas in his workshop for years prior to the vineyard visit. Even the wine press was only a few adjustments shy of the printing revolution, the engineering steadily nearing the next big idea.
Across generations we see the adjacent possible. Across a puzzle, we see how one answer can nourish the next. Consider the steam-powered industrial loom of Joseph Jacquard in the early 1800s, an apparatus to spawn the template for Charles Babbage’s difference engines, the proto-computers of the 1840s. From loom to calculator to computer: one advance leads to the next, in a single mind or across many.
Suzana Herculano-Houzel, a Brazilian neuroscientist, showed this eureka-chain vividly when confronting a long-standing brain conundrum. As part of her TED talk in 2013, Herculano-Houzel confessed to being curious about the number of neurons found inside the human brain. Everywhere she looked, every coworker she asked, seemed to suggest the grand tally stood at 100 billion, just as I did on this book’s preliminary tour, yet nobody could show how that figure had been reached. ‘I went digging through the literature,’ she recalled, ‘trying to find the original reference for that number, and I could never find it. It seems that nobody had ever actually counted the number of neurons in the human brain, or in any other brain for that matter.’
Said another way, the entire field of neuroscience was built on a fuzzy axiom. Nobody knew for sure how many neurons filled the brain. The common tally of 100 billion was a guess, and guesses are fine as hypotheses, but not what you need as a foundation for composing diligent theories.
Rather than hunches, Herculano-Houzel wanted an integer. Yet how to find it? Where would you start in calculating the neural total? This was a genuine test of mental connection. What other field of learning could offer an exact answer? What other eureka could the Brazilian harness to modify the guesstimate? In the end, the solution was cooking.
‘It works like this,’ as Suzana explained. ‘You take a brain, or part of that brain, and you dissolve it in detergent which destroys the cell membranes, but keeps the cell nuclei intact. So you end up with suspension of free nuclei that looks like this …’ The speaker pulled a phial from her pocket, wagging it like a wand at the TED crowd. Inside the tube was a mouse’s brain reduced to cloudy soup. ‘The beauty of the soup is you can agitate it’—she rocked the phial—‘and distribute those nuclei homogenously through the liquid.’ Several samples could now be examined through the microscope, tallying the nuclei and thereby calculating the total count of neurons. ‘It’s simple, it’s straightforward, and it’s really fast.’ And more exact than the long-standing guess of 100 billion ever was.
INVENTIVE LINKS
‘It is by logic that we prove,’ said French mathematician Henri Poincaré. ‘And it is by intuition that we discover.’ Here are some mental connections that went to trigger innovations:
Eiji Nakatsu, a Japanese engineer, is also an avid birdwatcher. Hence the sleek nose of the Shinkansen (or bullet train) mimics a kingfisher’s streamlined beak.
The warty edges of a humpback’s fin inspired US professor Frank Fish (seriously) to design the nodular blades seen on wind turbines.
Professor Graeme Clark held a grass blade within a spiral shell and started imagining. A few years later, in the late 1970s, the first bionic ear emerged from his Melbourne University lab.
Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes were keen to make 3D plastic wallpaper by gluing shower curtains together. By accident, the American engineers invented bubble wrap.
The barcode was inspired by Morse code, with US engineer Norman Woodland elongating the dots and dashes into scan-friendly symbols. (Extra fun fact: scanners read the white ‘gaps’ in each code, not the black stripes.)
Forty years ago, radio astronomer John O’Sullivan and his CSIRO colleagues were seeking to eavesdrop on the dim echoes of black holes. By 1992, the research helped O’Sullivan to fine-tune what we now call wi-fi.
Thanks to Herculano-Houzel’s creative method, bridging two unlikely banks, she could verify the human brain to own an average of 86 billion neurons. Better yet, the soup also yielded a regional census of our brains, with some 16 billion neurons occupying the cerebral cortex alone. ‘And if you consider the cerebral cortex is the seat of functions like awareness, and logical and abstract reasoning,’ she argued, ‘and that 16 billion is the most neurons than any cortex has, then I think this is the simplest explanation for our remarkable cognitive abilities.’
Across species, humans may well own the most neurons—86 billion is a zoological best—but only on the proviso that we know how to use them. From the world’s stage to the puzzle page, the brightest minds unthink and relink. Regardless of the problem, the solution is waiting, if only our mind is prepared.
