October• 2018 | 37READER’S DIGEST
don’t have all the pieces. he moment
when the ancient Greek scholar
Archimedes is said to have uttered the
original “Eureka!” (“I have found it!”
in Greek) came only after many weeks
of cogitating. He had been charged
with proving that a crown presented
to the king was not solid gold,
as the goldsmith claimed.
But the solution
eluded him until
he stepped into
the bathtub and
his body weight
caused some
water to spill
over the sides.
In that mo-
ment, he had
his method for
provingthatthecrownwasfake:a
wayofmeasuringthevolumeofan
objectbasedonitsbuoyancy.That
method became the Archimedes
principle. It explains how shipsloat
and submarines dive and is still
usedtodaytocalculatethevolume
of irregular objects.
“You accumulate all this expe-
rienceandbackground,”saysDr
Raichle,“andthenallofasudden,
there’s an association that your
brain has rather cleverly pulledof.”
Heisn’tspeakingjusttheoreti-
cally; it happened to him. In 2001,
hewaswalkingfromhisofficeto
anearbyconferenceroomtomeet
with colleagues after their paper
had been rejected for publication.If a searched-for solution is out-
side our familiar experience – which
is shaped by beliefs, culture and bi-
ases – the conscious mind will likely
never find it. A deliberate approach
can search the whole box but not out-
side it.
Indeed, research suggests that
thinking about a
problem too me-
thodically is often
an impediment
to solving it be-
cause we actually
block poten-
tial solutions
from floating into
consciousness, a
phenomenon
known as cogni-
tive inhibition.
As University of California neuro-
scientist Dr Jonathan Schooler discov-
ered, if you ask people to articulate an
idea they’re just hatching, the idea –
zoop!– vanishes.
“It’s a bit like trying to look at a dim
star,” says Dr Beeman. “You have to
turn your head and spy it out of the
corner of your eye; if you look at it
directly, it disappears.” In lab experi-
ments, subjects who are given a brain-
teaser and sleep on the problem or
otherwise back away from it are usu-
ally more likely to solve it than if they
just keep pounding away.
But here’s the other side: incubating
a conundrum isn’t enough on its own.
A puzzle will never be solvable if you
Thinking about
a problem too
methodically is often
an impediment to
solving it