NY Times Crossword & Addiction

The idea was novel. The need—certain. Millions are addicted to the New York Times crossword puzzle, some even doing it while driving or tending to our kids. I vowed to find a cure.

My crackpot team of neuroscientists and I spent seven years isolating the brain region responsible for this scourge. With rats inside fMRI machines, we flashed images of crosswords and mapped brain regions.

“This will never work,” said Igby, our lab tech. “Rats don’t know an adit from an epee.”

He was right, but I pushed on, believing the need for a cure outweighed all paradigms.

Because their brains mature later in life, ferrets were used by a German group. We copied their protocol, beginning slowly with Word Find and bar pressing. No progress; though, one outlier did press avidly for Sudoku. But that was another lab’s purview. We shared this knowledge, hoping to get on their grant, and moved on.

Our first breakthrough came when we inserted a viral vector containing names of European rivers and silent movie actresses (we used AAV) into the nucleus accumbens of Sprague-Dawleys.

“I’ve finished scoring the video,” said Igby, “and if we overlook all the data contrary to our hypothesis, it’s statistically significant.”

Sure enough, the post-surgery rats, when given a choice between their natural inclinations for a dark room and a lit room with a NY Times crossword, preferred the lit crossword, 12% more than controls. (However, controls preferred Sudoku; did I pick the wrong focus?)

On a whim, Igby tried the same conditioned place preference with cocaine and thinks he saw something worth pursuing in the future. Seems like a dead end to me, though.

Instead, I pushed exploring cognitive recovery by blocking the crossword receptors with a Scrabble competitive inhibitor, but the affect was merely temporary. We needed to up the dose.

“Bad day, boss,” said Igby. “One of the rats showed stereotypy.”

“What happened?”

“Well, I put in a Saturday NY Times Crossword … ”

“Are you insane?” “It’s way too early for that. You’re lucky you didn’t wipe out the entire colony!”

At the National Addiction Symposium, Igby presented our poster. A team at UC Davis had a model with fruit flies and Hangman that came dangerously close to our work. Fortunately, the scientists hadn’t figured out how to get the flies to guess the letter Y as the sole vowel. Time to publish.

I posted our preliminary data on Rex Parker’s blog, only to have commentators complain it was too easy for JAMA’s Thursday edition.

We conducted our first double-blind on humans; unfortunately, they missed all the boxes and wrote on the table top. Because the scientists were blindfolded as well, they didn’t notice the error until it was too late. Whoever invented this method is a blooming dolt.

I tried to jumpstart my mind by delving into the history of the crossword. In 1908, Arty Wentinagle invented the first black square; in 1929, he invented the second. In 1946, Mary Saperstein became the first female 200-meter breaststroker to solve a Friday puzzle. Of course, in 1982, Dan Quayle invented the rebus by forcing an o & e into the last box for the clue “Tater.” Was I using science to avoid larger moral issues?

My defenses were down. I awoke one Friday afternoon with a splitting headache and fourteen crossword carcasses scattered about before me. An open Bartlett’s was plastered to my forehead. I’ve hit bottom.

“I haven’t seen you in weeks,” said Igby. “I thought you’d abandoned the project.”

“Mea Culpa; I’m overwrought with compunction.”

“What?”

“It’s been a long week.” I hid my half folded Arts Section.

“Are you taking that one back into the lab?” he asked.

“What, this? Ha, no … this is the listing of show times for Final Destination 5.” Whew! Quick thinking.

It was true. I had been sneaking samples home with me. It began with Monday’s, but soon that wasn’t strong enough. Within a few weeks I was up to Wednesday’s. People noticed I was blanking out at work, staring off into some world inhabited by second-generation architects and Rubik’s cube inventors.

I stopped showing up at the lab after binging thirty hours straight on a Saturday puzzle. I haunted coffee shops looking for NY Times discards, stooping so low as to finish someone else’s half-solved castoffs. Once, I even picked a USA Today’s Life section off the floor.

My friends avoided me for fear I would hit them up for a pen. “Just to get me by, today. I’ll bring you two pens next week; please!” It was embarrassing.

Mine is a cautionary tale. What began as a promising career in cutting-edge science, ended as a fishmonger’s aide, hoping to snatch a carelessly overlooked crossword before wrapped around some Coho (4 letters).

I learned Igby moved into the private sector, working in forensic neuroscience for Hostess Twinkies, thwarting (9 letters) free will. If only I had that excuse. But I snack on Oreos (5 letters).