A father took to social media to challenge others to solve a word search his five-year-old son was struggling with. Newsweek When no one could find the answer, he was completely stumped.
In a Reddit post shared under the handle u/LordBadgerFlaps, a father of one, who wanted to be known only as Tom, from Nottingham, set a seemingly simple challenge to other users.
But those who tried the word search quickly discovered that this wasn’t the case at all.
There’s a very real, scientific reason why word puzzles remain a long-lasting pastime for many of us. In 2018, researchers at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to take a closer look at what happens in the brain when people solve word puzzles.
They found that when we complete these types of tasks, the parts of the brain that produce dopamine, a mood-enhancing chemical, become activated.
Unfortunately, in this instance, people were being deprived of a dopamine release. Even more frustrating, the task at hand seemed simple on the surface: All they had to do to complete the puzzle for Tom and his son was find the word “envy.”
But when Tom came across the puzzle while dining out with his family, they soon found themselves faced with the same problem. You can see the puzzle here:
Reddit/u/LordBadgerFlaps
“It was a word search for kids at a restaurant called Pizza Express,” he said. Newsweek“Our 5-year-old son, with his mom’s help, was trying to complete it. He said he couldn’t find ‘Envy.’ We thought he just couldn’t see it.”
Initially, they thought that, given his age, they might have simply missed him.
“So his mom picks up the puzzle, she looks at it, and she can’t find it,” Tom said. “She says it’s not there. And I say, ‘Of course it is, you must have missed it,’ and then it turns out the puzzle isn’t there.”
Stumped, Tom sent screenshots of the puzzle to his family, but when he didn’t hear back, he turned to Reddit in the hope that “someone would point it out, or maybe I just missed it.”
But that didn’t happen either.
“I couldn’t find ‘envy’ but I did find ‘Jed’ in the bottom left section. Hope that helps!” one user wrote. “Maybe they removed it on purpose to keep the kids occupied for longer?” another asked.
However, a third person confirmed this, commenting: “It’s definitely a typo. There are only five Y’s and none of them can be used to make ENVY. The closest would be ENNY and that’s probably how it was originally written.”
Tom agreed that it was probably a “typo or oversight,” but the restaurant didn’t bother to mention it because “staff have no control over corporate matters.”
Newsweek However, after contacting Pizza Express, they confirmed that this was indeed a mistake.
A Pizza Express spokesperson said: Newsweek: “We are aware of the typographical error in the word search and have made a correction ahead of the upcoming reprint.”
