Internet Can't Work Out This Spot the Difference Game Designed for Children

A Colorado dad has been left baffled by a Spot 5 Differences puzzle on the kids menu at his local town diner.

Michael Lewis from Denver told Newsweek the puzzle has been "driving me crazy" ever since he first laid eyes on it during a trip to Great Scott's Eatery with his wife and 7-year-old son.

"My wife and I were chatting, as we were waiting for our order, when my son, who was quietly working on the menu activities, asked me if I could help him find the 5th difference to the dolphin pictures. He had already identified the tail, spots, fin, and eyelashes," he said. "Try as we might, we could not find the fifth difference."

Spot the Difference might be a simple enough game, but partaking in it activates a very special area of the brain. That was the conclusion of a 2009 study published in the medical journal Magnetic Resonance in Medical Sciences.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers investigated the main cortical regions involved in playing this game and compared the sites of cortical activation between a session of playing the game and a session of looking at identical pictures.

What they found was that the right posterior parietal cortex showed more activation during game playing, and cortical activation volume correlated with game-playing accuracy. This suggested that the cortical region plays an important role in awareness of differences between two similar pictures.

In the case of Lewis, this particular area of the brain was working overtime to try and identify the fifth difference between the two images.

He reached a conclusion but he still needed some outside perspective so posted a picture of the puzzle to Reddit under the handle u/LewisCBR."I decided that it had to be the tail counting as two differences, but I wasn't sure, so I decided to ask the Internet collective," Lewis explained.

The responses were as varied as could be expected. "Is it, the left dolphin is a darker shade grey?" one puzzled responder asked. "The fin/flipper looks slightly higher on the right one, sort of like it rotates from the base," a second wrote with a third adding: "The one on the right is also slightly, but definitely, larger... but I had to bring it into Photoshop to test that, and I doubt the average kid has access to that in most restaurants."

Some saw the funny side in it all. "Left one is a Democrat, right one is Republican," they said. One even delved into the realm of conspiracy theory, writing "In a restaurant close to where I live, there is a word jumble on the table mat. We tried our hardest to find the last word and even asked the waiter finally and he said that they purposefully don't add the last one so we spend time looking for it and forget the waiting time."

Another agreed: "I reckon they've done this so that the child is entertained for longer. You could say they did it on porpoise..."

Newsweek has reached out to Great Scott's Eatery for comment. One eagle-eyed user spotted what he believed to right answer to the missing fifth answer. "It looks like the blushes are actually different colors," they said.

Whatever the result, Norris has been heartened by the response to the clip. "I'm happy Reddit found the puzzle as infuriating as I did," he said. "There were a lot of views and replies, but everyone seemed to have fun with it."

Even so he may think twice before taking a look at any kids' puzzles again.

Update 2/12/24, 8:38 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with a new headline and image.