Ambigrammia: Between Creation & Discovery

In this spellbinding and truly one-of-a-kind volume, Pulitzer Prize–winning cognitive scientist Hofstadter (Godel, Escher, Bach) shares his passion for ambigrams, or visual text puzzles created by “distorting letters in order to make doubly readable words.” His fascination with them dates back to his undergraduate days, when he started designing word-art that could be read backwards, forwards, flipped upside down, or rotated 180 degrees. According to Hofstadter, these clever flights of fancy illuminate how humans learn and use language on an unconscious level—for instance, ambigrams reveal that written language has “minimal chunks,” aka the simplest arrangements of marks that the brain can immediately recognize as writing. Hofstadter also describes the more esoteric properties of written text that result in ambigrams, such as occurrences of “intrinsic symmetry”—write the word chump in lowercase cursive and it will spell the same word when flipped upside-down, no distortion necessary. Throughout, Hofstadter offers wide-ranging asides on the history of science, from Einstein to AI (opining on whether AI could be “capable of the kind of ‘intrinsically human’ cognition employed in creating ambigrams,” he concludes “with a sense of great malaise” that “I don’t know”). Written in a disarming, conversational tone that belies Hofstadter’s mastery of the subject matter, and lavishly illustrated with full-color diagrams on nearly every page, this is an absolute delight. (July)