the.com/brainteaser
A puzzle designed to make smart people feel briefly, deeply stupid.
means A puzzle or problem that's deliberately tricky to solve, built to exercise mental agility rather than knowledge.
from A straightforward 19th/20th-century compound of 'brain' plus 'teaser' — from 'tease,' meaning to provoke or torment playfully. The word followed the same pattern as other invented challenges of the era (brainstorm, brainwave), picturing the mind as something you could prod, pester, and set deliberately on edge for sport.
- origin era
- term popularized in puzzle columns of the 1900s
- not iq tests
- measures lateral thinking, not raw intelligence
- job interviews
- google famously abandoned them, they predicted nothing
- best trait
- answer feels obvious only after you see it