I mentioned in one of Destiny’s posts that I am related (very distantly) to the inventor of Scrabble. I actually realized this when I read his obituary a few years ago and saw that we had the same last name. Perhaps that’s why I have a great love of word games, number games, riddles and puzzles of all sorts. So try this. Add up the following series of numbers in your head:
1000
20
30
1000
1030
1000
+ 20
-------
????
If you said 5000, then you join the ranks of….almost everyone, including mathematicians, scientists and geniuses everywhere. The answer is 4,100.
This puzzle is called a priming illusion. All of those 1000’s in the question “prime” us into thinking in terms of thousands and we kinda “forget” about hundreds. It’s like the oldie where you are asked to say “white” ten times, really loud. Then when you are asked “what do cows drink?” you automatically answer “milk”. The “white-drink-cows” primes us to think milk even though we all know that cows drink water! Cool eh?
