66 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER29, 2021
a hint that’s not as much of a hint as you
think it is,” Rothstein said. “It tantalizes.”
Fisher had even employed the clas-
sic Runcie trick: a turn toward the pe-
riphery in order to reach the center. Hugo
Spiers, a cognitive neuroscientist at Uni-
versity College London, told me he has
found that humans are seemingly help-
less to resist the magnetic attraction of
a goal. “They kind of hedge-scan when
they know they’re near the goal,” he said.
“They look over to it, like they’re long-
ing to get to it.” That single-minded
focus makes it all too easy to discount
paths that lead backward, away from the
goal. At Escot, the bridges, as well as
several paths that run immediately
around the edge of the goal without pro-
viding access to it, offer tempting views
of the maze’s central tower, while the
path to reach the center requires aspi-
rants to maintain their distance, travel-
ling under rather than over the bridges.
Van Deventer, who lives near another
Fisher hedge maze, Europe’s largest,
built at the point where the Nether-
lands, Belgium, and Germany meet, at-
tempted to make me feel better about
my miserable maze-solving skills. “In
that maze, the final path to the exit is
going outwards, so you have to walk
away from your goal,” he said. “And, for
the first and the second time there, I
missed that one path, so Adrian’s trick-
ery works on me, even though I may be
prepared for it.”
Fisher frequently likens his role as a
maze designer to that of a chess player
faced with unusual constraints. “I have
to play all my moves in advance, and I
have to let you win, and I have to let you
win just before you’ve had enough,” he
said. “I’m here to entertain.” Part of a
maze’s amusement value lies in present-
ing a decent yet surmountable challenge;
the other part involves engineering the
conditions for a fun family day out. After
all, chess is, like most puzzles, a fairly
solitary activity. Mazes, on the other hand,
tend to be social spaces, and Fisher’s de-
signs are especially, and intentionally, so.
“I’m not bragging,” van Deventer told
me, “but I believe that by walking through
a maze I’m able to recognize whether it
is an Adrian Fisher.” One of the clues,
he said, is long loops that repeatedly
throw people back together. “We’ve seen
you before,” a young woman at Escot
said as we passed each other going in
opposite directions. Two little girls hud-
dled under one of the pergolas, develop-
ing a leaf-based divination system; when
we came across them again, at the cen-
ter, they explained that the leaves had
failed to provide the solution, but that
they’d found a spot where a very small
person could squeeze through the hedge
instead. Running into the same people
while failing at the same puzzle fosters
a curious camaraderie; even when we
were visually alone, we could hear the
comforting sounds of our comrades-in-
confusion through the hedge walls.
“I think he is the world’s best maze
psychologist,” van Deventer said. “He
has a mental model of what people
would be doing, and he is using that
against the unsuspecting solver and
even against the suspecting solver.”O
ne day in 1898, Edmund Sanford, a
leading professor of psychology at
Clark University, was discussing the ex-
traordinary navigational skills of rats with
two graduate students, Linus Kline and
Willard Small. Kline later recalled that
Sanford, having just returned from a trip
to London, “at once suggested the pos-
sibility of using the pattern of the Hamp-
ton Court maze for purposes of con-
structing a ‘home-finding’ apparatus.”
Kline, who had never heard of a maze,
looked up the design of Hampton Court’s
horticultural puzzle in the Encyclopædia
Britannica, warped it to fit into a square
box, scaled it down to rodent height, and
replaced the hedges with gnaw-resistant
mesh. A few years later, Small published
the first research on the intelligence of
white rats, as evidenced by their maze-
solving ability. Together, as the historian
of psychology C. James Goodwin has
written, “they launched a rats-in-mazes
tradition that continues to this day.”
For decades, the behavior of albino
rats in mazes—and, by extension, that
of the humans who studied them—was
turned into a science: something that
could be explained and, ultimately, en-
gineered. As a challenge, the maze trans-
lated well across species, unlike tests in-
volving, say, symbols or color; as a model,
the maze was “the most general, the
most representative, and the most per-
fect” simulation of the larger, choice-
filled problem of life itself, as Rebecca
Lemov writes in “World as Laboratory,”
a history of behavioral research. For anew generation of researchers, mazes
became “a shorthand way of asking,
‘Why does the self behave as it does?’”
Over time, the Hampton Court de-
sign has been superseded: today’s cog-
nitive-enhancement-drug trials are typ-
ically carried out in something called
the Morris water maze, in which swim-
ming rats must respond to various spa-
tial cues to reach a platform. Still, the
importance of mazes in research per-
sists, as does the sense that mazes reveal
something about our minds. The great
Italian Renaissance mathematician Luca
Pacioli, who laid the foundations of mod-
ern accounting by inventing double-
entry bookkeeping, suggested that maze-
like puzzles might be a useful tool to
“sharpen the ingenuity of youths,” in
much the same way that sudoku is now
recommended for seniors.
Speculation about the point of a maze
leads, inevitably, to the question of why
one would choose to get lost in the first
place. The psychologist Kenneth Hill,
an emeritus professor at Saint Mary’s
University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who
spent his career doing seminal work
studying how lost people behave, told
me that he found it hard to see the at-
traction of a maze. “When I talk to peo-
ple who’ve been lost, they say it’s the
scariest, most frightening thing they’ve
ever experienced,” he said. “That’s not
something I want to pay to do.”
On the other hand, with rare excep-
tions, no one dies in a maze: like a roller
coaster, it’s a safe way to experience dan-
ger. And, assuming you reach the goal
and then make it out, you will come away
with a sense of triumph—a tamer ver-
sion of the heroic narrative that Hill has
found is common among people who
have been truly lost. “If you talk to them
right away, they can’t say much—they’re
still in shock,” he said. “If you wait a cou-
ple of days, what you get is this saga
about conquering their emotions and
their fears and how they pushed through.”
Some scientists hope that under-
standing the ways in which humans get
lost in mazes will offer useful insights
into how to design the built environ-
ment, as well as techniques we can use
to train ourselves to pay better atten-
tion to our surroundings. As Spiers told
me, “A major part of being human and
living life is adapting to change, remem-
bering what you can do, exploiting short-