(created in September 2024 for, but not submitted in time to enter archive of, the 2024 Galactic Puzzle Hunt. Entering the answer in the form https://gmpuzzles.com/s/ANSWER will give access to my “Where we’re going we don’t need phones” poem mentioned in prior blog post.)

When I get a little hypomanic, or a lot hypomanic, or dangerously manic, I have energy and a willingness to engage humanity at the same time and curious ideas come out that are teaching me about how my brain works and doesn’t work. I share thoughts for myself and for others, because not all people with these conditions can describe what is happening to them and maybe there is something helpful by being transparent.

Right now I have a lot of parts in my life where things are working well (or better) than when I was first “lost” in 2022 and in a hospital because my brain had stormed out of control. And in 2023, two times I failed to take my condition seriously and failed to get support or to use medication and it again put me back into the hospital. I have not been close to hospitalization for 20 months, but I have been relying on a support team with therapists and a psychiatrist and friends, to navigate this world and not so easily be set off by it. My wellness team started to plan for and learn about my mood swings that can come from overstimulating my brain. We started to openly discuss what parts of doing things like puzzles are turning on the addictive / dopamine parts of my brain in a dangerous way. And from group therapy and other settings I’ve found commonalities in others’ lived experience when their conditions or their “drugs” are different, whether ketamine or doom-scrolling on a phone.

I am not smart enough — no one is — to handle a condition like bipolar disorder alone. With a team, I’m hopeful we can manage it. Mental (I)llness becoming mental (We)llness. But not without weeks like this where I’m in a high state and my neurons are firing and I need to be typing ideas to slow them down because my inhibitory system is not working well.

So what does this have to do with puzzles? And can’t we just get back to puzzles and find the “soma” we crave as an escape from the pain of the world? Well, let me tell you that I can’t tell you about my favorite puzzle of last year without sharing I could not have discovered it without doing something dangerous. Playing in an addicting puzzlehunt.

In summer 2024 I saw someone mention the Galactic Puzzle Hunt used an unusual and fun new structure and was something people should check out. I really trusted the person and had the time over the second weekend to try. I don’t like remote solving hunts ever so I just soloed the hunt. It was the most addictive form of a puzzle hunt I have seen, because of its structure. I failed to live up to some of my self-care goals as a result. My sleep hygiene went bad because there were always these small puzzles to solve that often had loose themes and lots of small Ahas like little hits of dopamine that gave you a new thing to do right away so 10 PM and time to sleep became 2 AM became next day became full weekend until Hunt was done. I know better, and still the desperation of a lonely September weekend became taking too many hits of drug-like puzzles in a digitally supplied form. It was all the worst techniques of modern free-to-play games that have made timed returns and releases and nudge nudge nudge commitments served up to the kind of genius who can independently solve a puzzle hunt in just two to three days and will never feel that stuck.

Still, besides these little hits of energy, there were the larger experiences (celestial puzzles) that engaged a different part of the brain with a larger challenge. Like one logic puzzle set that used a song on infinite repeat, “Rock Lobster”, which is a song I now have in my could listen to it forever list. One way to lose track of time: play a puzzle with a looping soundtrack. Rock Lobster!

By far the most intellectually and philosophically stimulating puzzle was called the Kid, my favorite puzzle of 2024. It involved playing with blocks, trying to learn a set of rules and thinking you succeeded only to maybe not and trying again with a new hypothesis. Doing that for awhile until you finally get to a last step where unless you have mastery you cannot win and the learning jump is not at all forgiving. To me the Kid exemplifies the problem solving challenges of life and the different approaches to address them. How real intelligence (from people or from machines) means crossing lots of hurdles in different ways. Brute force search can do some parts of Kid better than I ever can. Perhaps without any learning. But then there were the parts of the puzzle where even I was just starting with brute force until I could grab onto a pattern and form and test hypotheses. it is impossible to complete the full puzzle without being a high intelligence. But high in our scale, it is probably just a Kid for where intelligence could get to. Human and machine? Actual intelligence and not artificial?

The Kid wasn’t necessarily the easiest or hardest of the big puzzles, but it is the one that sticks with me. In the day after I finished the hunt I was suddenly hypomanic, reading Silver Linings Playbook which further engaged my bipolar self and the focus on triggering songs that bring back good/bad memories and now one like that with “Rock Lobster!”. I wrote unusual poetry, a work I’ll call “Where we’re going we don’t need phones”, if I ever release it, connecting the Kid to bipolar to the number 19 to my best female friends to music and so much more. I have a style of writing now when where hypomanic I type a thought, hit enter, type a related thought, hit enter, and continue. A long brain chain of poetry spits out with connections that are obvious to me but maybe few others between thoughts so while it jumps from sights and sounds and ideas all around my brain there are cohesive themes that pop back up as I return to focus. Sometimes typing thought after thought forms a piece like this. A large amount of my highly important workplace writing is controlled hypomania as I see it now. A large amount of my freeform nonsense is something else.

You don’t get the Rock Lobster poem today. The first time I wrote like that I was absolutely manic, thought I needed to write without being able to see for a while so I shut my eyes and fumbled my way to a computer and then fumbled a way into typing and such. My “all white” poem as I could only see blinding ideas without my eyes. That piece is revelatory and frightening in how the artist was working. In the same way seeing Van Gogh’s works not only when he was self-asylumed but also in the days he wouldn’t leave his room are, to recognize aspects of form and dysfunction that I can write to my Theo (you all on the internet) in a new way. I don’t think you are ready for those words when I’m much higher in creative state. But writing them was a part of my therapy. Because getting some thoughts out of my head and onto paper or whatever stops those neurons from firing briefly. Gradually the brain storm becomes a drizzle becomes just a healthy cloudy Seattle day if I can do it right. That was the situation in Seattle behind “Where we’re going we don’t need phones”. Because my brain was storming, I found a need to just sit on a park bench with the promise to eat pizza after my ideas were out of my head. 1 hour and then that pizza and then normal sleep and use of medication later I had managed a potentially overwhelming set of ideas in ways I hadn’t before. I didn’t get stuck in an escalating hypomania. I decided to be deliberately careful before playing another puzzle hunt in any mode, and I still haven’t. I may never play in a puzzle hunt again. I certainly need to have a handler / accountability partner for “eat, drink, sleep” checks throughout the day if I do.

So puzzles affect my brain in the way an addict’s might be. Do you want to know something else that I am addicted to, that sends my brain to interesting places? Being near people. I don’t see them often in my normal life, and far less since the pandemic, and love releases a set of “dangerous” chemicals to me given how socially isolated most of my days are. I’m learning better to manage them, but I knew SudokuCon would probably push me into an elevated mood for at least 5-7 days and it has done so. I am still getting some sleep, I am using the rescue medications even earlier to stay stabilized. This is controlled writing, but it is important and unusual writing. An ok question is “Thomas are you okay?” and my answer is “yes, I’m actually better than fine. I think I’ve finally found a life mission since feeling ‘lost’ but I should be sleeping more”.

I think I’m about to focus onto a specific life mission by using sudoku, but I can’t ignore how dangerous puzzles have been in my later adult life in coping with the world. I didn’t grow up by drinking alcohol or doing any other real drugs. My tolerance set-points are different, but dopaminergic addiction still a problem all the same particularly with a neurodivergent brain.

That is the last I’ll say for now on mental issues. The Kid raises a host of ideas about intelligence and proving it through puzzles. We’ll get to real and artificial modes of intelligence soon, whatever day I wake up with a need to type and clear my head as part of restoring order.

Rock Lobster!

A post for those waiting too anxiously for the next puzzles here; some unexpected and potentially fun puzzles will soon be coming but this public service message on how puzzles and other stimulants may affect your brain seemed more important today.

At SudokuCon, I told a story about how after the WSC2 in Prague the first interview was with a sex advice columnist asking how I use sudoku in a relationship or even in the bedroom. I did not then have examples as I do now of a marriage proposal sudoku, or a witty joke about having too much experience as a “naked single” to know a lot about “naked pairs”. The doku in sudoku comes from dokushin meaning “lonely” or “bachelor” after all. And I got into Sudoku soon after a break-up and have been in a twenty year relationship with Sudoku without being willing to put a ring on it because making puzzles is not my life mission. Anyway, I keep a log of good answers for the future when an unexpected media request comes to me.

The most frequently repeated answer is how does Sudoku connect to my life and/or to my work in science, and that is about problem solving. I am a great problem solver even if you think of me as a great Sudoku solver. In sudoku, all puzzles should have one answer and we should agree on it when we see it. Many different techniques might be taken and it might take an open mind to find something hard when stuck, so stepping away from the problem and coming back with fresh eyes can help. Those problem-solving techniques also apply to science and medicine, but in a space where there may or may not be an answer and we have to use the scientific method to assert a rationale, test it, and advance from there. The problems of science take teams and different perspectives and not just fifteen minutes and a pencil. But being a great problem solver starts from something as simple as figuring out Sudoku, and I enjoy coming back to the places of comfort when the rest of the world feels too difficult to solve so puzzles are also part of my mental health journey.

The newest logged answer comes to the question of what to do if you are “addicted” to sudoku. It was first asked to me by a comedic podcaster who takes unique approaches to solving people’s problems. The remaining words are pure, crystal blue Snyder, and I know I’ll at least come back to these a lot because being an addict and having a bipolar brain is a dangerous mix:

We talk about someone “addicted” to sudoku in quotations as if it is not a drug. I am here, as a huge drug addict from hardcore puzzles, to tell you that you can actually be addicted to sudoku, when you abuse it too much. In a world in which there are a lot of problems and none of them seem solvable, you might first find comfort in a simple number puzzle that you slowly work your way through until there are just ten and then five and then fourthreetwoonedone digits left and it feels good. Dopamine rushing through your brain. You go a little further and get a little better at Sudoku and now you can do even the “hard” ones better and the rush is even higher with the hard grids. You start losing track of time, you forget to eat, you stop being intimate with your partner, your brain is thinking everything is right because all the pleasure neurotransmitters are signaling but they are not firing for the right reasons and you haven’t eaten and your partner has left you and that only makes you want to solve even more.

Sudoku may sometimes be a medicine and make you happy, but too much of it can be an addiction and that is bad. Now Sudoku is weak sauce compared to the drugs the FDA regulates, but it is hitting many if not all of the same processes in the brain at a fundamental level. We don’t live in a world where someone running naked in the streets screaming “Will Shortz” is instantly identified as a crossword addict, and police don’t check for graphite residue on your fingers when they pull you over for driving under the influence. But you do need to do some of the same things an addict might in the more extreme situations to get better because they know best how to treat an addiction. First, detoxify. Stop solving any sudoku puzzle that Thomas Snyder wrote that might activate your brain a lot — go to the uninteresting ones that still look like sudoku but are boring like a computer-generated very easy. Or go to something sudoku-adjacent. Maybe word searches are something that detoxifies you with the letters A-Z over fifteen minutes in a safer way than Sudoku did with 1-9. Find an accountability partner. Have them limit your supply of sudoku so you do not overdose in a day. If still in trouble, seek professional help. As someone smart once said, moderation in all things, even sudoku itself.

It has been awhile since messages here, but I’m working on a lot of things in life as I rebuild to achieve a larger mission. My jigsaw is slowly being assembled, and I think the last 100 pieces came together when I met 100 new friendly faces at SudokuCon in Boston. People to whom I can tell the truth about Snyder Notation, not “Snyder Notation”. Where I even shared stories of solving a puzzle in a playoff that included Tetsuya Nishio, someone who sometimes thinks as far as his head can with a contradiction before placing a sure number down into the grid. The same way I do. But not at all “Nishio logic”, which has a reputation as guessing in the sudoku community when I won a playoff puzzle that also eliminated Tetsuya Nishio because he never guessed. Sometimes our intuitions are the smartest and fastest ways to do things but they cannot be distilled into rules and that is how both “Nishio chains” and “Snyder notation” and whatever are named after two great sudokumasters and have some of the bits right but not the essence of what their namesakes did or do.

So more experimentation incoming with Sudoku. In new ways a person who paints in Sudoku might tell his autobiography, but also a person who might have a brain like Van Gogh when self-asylumed at those moments of painting too. I also stopped at the MFA for the Roulin family portrait show this week, and the letters from Roulin to Van Gogh’s relatives after his hospitalization for cutting off the ear are the things that stuck with me the most and kept me grounded through an overstimulatory weekend.

I recognize outside the Classic Sudoku that most of the more experimental late 2024 “Twelve Days of Sudoku”/”Ready Layer One” work looks uninterpretable without me; at SudokuCon I was overjoyed to have a first solve of a younger life photo collage puzzle (one of the Motivational Posters) by watching people try and sometimes answering questions and giving light nudges. I also led a group play of an improved Just One Cell Sudoku from that period of my “dangerous” art making and other brainstorming with a storming brain.

This puzzle can be graded on a 0 out of 5 scale, and that is how a group with shared ideas was able to get all the way to the perfect answer by going one point at a time. I hope it shows that there is more than one way to do something interesting with Sudoku, and I don’t have to write down any rules for this puzzle for a viewer of any age, even if I would score the answers from a child and an adult and a SudokuCon member differently.

So to my new friends from SudokuCon, join our Discord (link in a lot of other obvious places) and slowly find my threads if you want to be a part of this conversation. Bring me something interesting with legos, for example, that only an intellectually adult person should see.