Mastermind - How to think like sherlock holmes by Konnikova Maria

Author:Konnikova, Maria [Konnikova, Maria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-01-20T09:58:15+00:00

Now, try to think of a single word that can be added to each of these to form a compound or a two-word phrase.

Done? How long did it take? And how did you come about your solution?

There are two ways to solve this problem. One comes from insight, or seeing the right word after a few seconds of searching, and the other comes from an analytical approach, or trying out word after word until one fits. Here, the proper answer is apple (crab apple, pineapple, applesauce), and one can arrive at it either by seeing the solution or going through a list of possible candidates (Cake? Works for crab but not pine. Grass? Ditto. Etcetera). The former is the equivalent of picking out those items in the opposite corners of your attic and making them into a third related, yet unrelated, thing that makes complete sense the moment you see it. The latter is the equivalent of rummaging through your attic slowly and painfully, box by box, and discarding object after object that does not match until you find the one that does.

Absent imagination, you’re stuck with that second not very palatable alternative, as Watson would be. And while Watson might get to the right answer eventually in the case of a puzzle like the word associates, in the real world there’s no guarantee of his success, since he doesn’t have the elements laid out in front of him as nicely as those three words, crab, pine, sauce. He hasn’t created the requisite mind space for insight to even be possible. He has no idea which elements may need to come together. He has, in other words, no conception of the problem.

Even his brain will be different from Holmes’s as he approaches the problem, be it the word association or the case of the builder. At first glance, if Watson were to come to the right answer on his own, we might not see an immediate difference. In either Holmes or Watson’s case, a brain scan would show us that a solution has been reached approximately three hundred milliseconds before the solver realizes it himself. Specifically, we would see a burst of activity from the right anterior temporal lobe (an area just above his right ear that is implicated in complex cognitive processing), and an increased activation in the right anterior superior temporal gyrus (an area that has been associated with perceiving emotional prosody—or the rhythm and intonation of language that conveys a certain feeling—and bringing together disparate information in complex language comprehension).

But Watson may well never reach that point of solution—and we’d likely know he’s doomed long before he himself does. While he’s struggling with the puzzle, we would be able to predict if he was heading in the right direction by looking at neural activity in two areas: the left and right temporal lobes, associated with the processing of lexical and semantic information, and the mid-frontal cortex, including the anterior cingulate, associated with attention switching and the detection of inconsistent and competing activity.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.