Imagine you’re trapped in the jungle with only 12 seconds to escape before a tiger attacks and tears off your limbs.
In this made-up situation, if you see the tiger before it sees you, you will most likely survive, either because you can evade it well enough or, more likely, because the tiger will believe it can no longer ambush you if you look it in the eyes.
If you ever find yourself in danger from a tiger’s teeth or claws, you might want to make some significant eye contact. You don’t want to put this notion to the ultimate test.
This is the task: look at the image below and see if you can identify the tiger’s location in 12 seconds.
It’s great to read that being able to do this suggests you have good vision and a high IQ.
Naturally, it’s possible that your tiger sighting was a stroke of luck, and you shouldn’t put too much stock in an IQ test that asks you to play “spot the tiger” for 12 seconds.
Nonetheless, it’s an intriguing little brainteaser that you might figure out right away or that will take you to carefully inspect each pixel as the countdown counts down.
The main goal of this test is to assess your ability to recognise uncommon traits and quickly infer their potential explanations.
This is what many optical illusions do: they provide you with a visual problem that you must solve rapidly.
One of them is as simple as asking you what building is nearest to the camera. It may appear straightforward, but it can be more challenging than expected.
With a little help from Microsoft Paint, I was able to solve our tiger puzzle and share it with you.
The tiger is squatting in the underbrush, precisely beneath the main tree. To be honest with you, reader, I didn’t notice it at first since I assumed it was perched on a tree branch.
Rather, I realised just in time that those were just leaves, and the truly dangerous stripes were located closer to the ground.
If you’re still unable to see it, let’s delve deeper within.
That should make things clearer for you. However, because human vision cannot zoom in very far, approaching the tiger in stages would be the real-world counterpart of this.
If you’re searching for something less time-consuming, check out this unique puzzle designed by an artist for GCHQ.
If you can understand clues and piece them together to produce a message, you may have spy-like problem-solving abilities.
