In this post I’d like to discuss an intersting “Mental Block” we all suffer from.
Let’s begin with a simple puzzle:
One of the king’s servants presents him with a bottle and says, “I have in this bottle a magic substance that can dissolve any other substance”. How did the king know immediately that his servant was lying?
The answer is very simple:
If it can dissolve anything, how come it doesn’t dissolve the bottle?!
This is a simple puzzle, and yet many of us need to think a while before we come up with the answer. Why is that?
My explanation is that when faced with a problem we make a very quick and mostly automatic and unconscious distinction between the information that has immediate relevance to the situation at hand and the one that doesn’t.
In this case, for example, we concentrate on the substance and tend to forget about the bottle.
I believe that this “mental block” is related to the evolution of the mind. To help us survive, the mind has been “programmed” through evolution to first and foremost handle immediate threats. And in order to optimally handle threats the mind MUST filter out any information that is not directly related to the threat.
When facing a threatening lion, for example, our ancestors couldn’t allow themselves to stop and examine all the aspects of the situation. They had to make a quick decision either to hunt it or run away (and if they made the wrong decision, well…)
The problem is that today when most of our problems are not immediate threats, we still use a system that was “designed” to handle threats to solve them.
And this is exactly the reason why we need artificial tools, such as SIT, to help us pay attention to details we usually don’t pay attention to. SIT does this by forcing us to prepare two lists of objects before we solve a problem: immediate problem objects and background or environmental objects.
The SIT philosophy is that *everything* that can be found in the problem arena can be used to solve it.
Here’s another clever puzzle:
Which is the next letter in this series?
W, I, T, N, L, I, T,…
The answer is…
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
The next letter in the series is ‘S’! It is the first letter of the word ’series’. All the other letters in this series are the first letters of the words in the question itself.
Most people have difficulties solving this problem since they do not consider the question as part of the problem.
See you all in my next posts,
Roni
Visit Roni at the start2think website
Interesting!
Sometimes delays and non linearities leave some -probably relevant- background variables inside the blindspot. Combining SIT with systems thinking could help.
Fabian
I strongly agree with your analysis, and the observation that we tend to filter out as irrelevant plenty of potentially useful information. Another interesting question is, of course, how to overcome this tendency. The principle of Closed World, which you defined in your PhD work is very helpful in this respect. In addition, while i was observing myself in my attempts to solve this puzzle, i noticed that i was using something else. I startet with asking myself what is the CW of this probelm and what elemetns i can utilize. So i spent a couple of minutes focusing on the “…” at the end of the series, thinking that this is the element i needed for the solution. When that didnt seem to lead to anything, i started looking at the line through slit eyes, trying to discern a pattern in their shape or sound, i then started changing the focus, zooming in and out. I think the clue was the capital “W”: zooming in and out i noticed that there were two “W”s one above the other. then the rest suddenly seemd obvious. Zooming in and out in terms of what you consider relevant is therefore what helped me,as well as trying to identify recurring patterns within the data.
worthwhile remembering maybe that very often, in real life, our problem is the opposite one - an inability to seek the relevant imformation from the clutter.
thanks for the thought-provoking.