This is a metapuzzle that requires information from the other five puzzles in this pathway.
Question 1 of this mini-cog requires us to realise each puzzle title refers to a mnemonic in medicine; for example, DIG FAST is an acronym for manic symptoms in bipolar disorder. Additionally, if we navigate to the puzzle page itself for Subject 1 Dig Fast, we notice there is a red "G" in DIG FAST. This suggests we need to get the word that G stands for (GRANDIOSITY) and input that into the first line of the puzzle grid.
Next, we take the puzzle solution for Subject 1 Dig Fast, which is FRESHWATERS, which we enter into the second grid line. Suggestively these grids look like the backwards-WORLD assessment as part of the sMMSE, which is to check which letters are placed in the correct spot. In the case of Subject 1, the only letter that is correctly placed is R. In fact, for each of the subjects, only one letter is correctly placed.
Subject 1
G in DIG FAST
GRANDIOSOTY
Solution
FRESHWATERS
Subject 2
T in TUNA FISH
TRAUMA
Solution
DANUBE
Subject 3
T in LEAD KETTLE
THYROID
Solution
FINLAND
Subject 4
H in MONA BASH
HEPARIN
Solution
CURATED
Subject 5
S in I GET SMASHED
SCORPIONSTING
Solution
SEXONTHEBEACH
Question 2 is about recognising that the letters from Question 1 spell out RUDAS, which is another cognitive screen.
Question 3 is a grid containing yellow and green colours, very smiliar to Wordle! Indeed, using Wordle's colour scheme (green = correctly placed letter, yellow = incorrectly placed letter that is present in the word), and the clue that the five-letter word should score a 4 on the sMMSE, leads us to RDLOW as the solution for Question 3.
The final step is to compare RUDAS to RDLOW, noticing that they both share R in the first letter. In the case of the RUDAS, the R stands for ROWLAND, which is the solution to this puzzle.
Author's notes
Author: Dan
I conceived of this set of puzzles as I thought there were a whole bunch of funny medical mnemonics that could easily be turned into puzzles. While the puzzles in this set were not as centred on medicine as other sets (e.g. pathway 4), I thought it provided a refreshing break from purely medical puzzles that this puzzle hunt (and previous puzzle hunts) had contained.
Out of my three puzzle sets, this mini-meta was the most involved and, in some ways, the most clunky. It has a fairly substantial “shell” with a lot of steps and required solvers to follow said steps sequentially without much direction bar some cryptic clues.
I thought that the first step would be well-received — the mnemonics that we developed for the words/phrases that solvers were supposed to “remember” were a direct allusion to the puzzle titles, which all represented pretty well-known medical mnemonics. The letter highlighted in red represented a red herring of sorts until solvers encountered this mini-meta puzzle.
Solvers would then match those words/phrases with their answers from the puzzle. They would realise that these word/phrase pairs would share the same number of letters and hopefully also recognise that they each share one and only one unique letter. While this might not be the most obvious of observations to make, I hoped that the unique letters spelling out RUDAS as a response to the second question would point solvers onto the right track, and indeed we did have a lot of guesses for “RUDAS”.
At this stage, I was tempted to offer a partial answer for RUDAS to confirm to solvers that they were on the right track; however, I decided against it as solvers might be tempted to guess random cognitive screens (e.g. MMSE, MOCA, RUDAS, etc.) in an attempt to get an answer to the second question.
I accept that the final step was probably a little less intuitive. Solvers had to solve the Wordle shell (with the number of letters and colour scheme alluding to this). There is only one unique response for this Wordle shell that would also yield an sMMSE score of 4 (“RDLOW”). They were then expected to perform the same matching exercise as they did in the first question (but this time without a helpful grid to guide them and make them realise this). Finally, they would work in reverse and recognise that the first “R” is shared between “RUDAS” and “RDLOW”, and, going back to the mnemonic principle, the first “R” represents “ROWLAND” in the “RUDAS” acronym.
The RUDAS is an underrated cognitive screen and was uniquely developed in Australia, which I thought was something worth highlighting through this puzzle.
ADDENDUM: I realise after the fact that there was an alternative response for the Wordle shell — “LRDOW” would also fit and would unfortunately overlap the letter “D” of “RUDAS”, yielding “DEMENTIA” as a potential alternative solution. While I didn’t receive any direct feedback alerting me of this, this could potentially explain the surprising number of guesses for “DEMENTIA” (although it is unclear if those represented random stabs in the dark or guesses that followed the above logic path). Apologies for any confusion caused.