Every once in awhile, a puzzle shows up on YouTube or on Facebook, daring readers to try to solve it. In the last six months alone, we've been asked to "find the panda," and "figure out the fruit." These puzzles — regardless of whether they're hard, easy, or make sense — end up getting tens of thousands of shares across the internet.
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Lasse Burholt knows this.
Burholt, a 42-year-old man from Denmark, created a video claiming he could "read your mind." He held up a bunch of signs asking viewers to complete simple math problems. Then he asked them to think of a number between one and twelve. He says he knows what number you thought of, and if he was right, you have to promise to share the video!
Check out the video here and see what number you come up with:
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Okay, so was your number seven? Mine wasn't, it was nine. And if you look at the Facebook comments underneath his video — which, by the way, got 25 million views across his two Facebook pages — there are tons of people commenting to say their number wasn't seven, either.
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But that didn't stop the video from getting thousands and thousands of shares (not to mention tons of articles written about it).
"The main reason for this video's huge viral hit rate is because hundreds of thousands of Facebook users simply cannot stop themselves from pointing out I did not guess which number they picked," Burholt told The Daily Mail. "I ... felt this video could help me make a lot of noise on Facebook proving the fact a lot of users have a strange urge to comment everything, especially point out how right they are."
He's ... not wrong.
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Dive deep into the comments under his page and you see dozens of arguments between people who think they know why seven is "supposed" to be the number, and people who think it's BS.
This seems to be a great way to go viral: Make up a math problem, or claim to be able to "read minds" (if your only options are picking a number between one and twelve, someone's bound to pick the number you say they did), and let everyone else battle it out in the comments while you watch laughing from a safe distance.
Burholt is absolutely gleeful over his viral hit, and continues to comment on most replies left on his video:
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