There’s a particular type of cognitive failure that I reliably experience, which seems like a pure kind of misconfiguration of the mind, and which I’ve found very difficult to will myself to not experience, which feels like some kind of fundamental limitation.
The quickest way to illustrate this is with an example: I’m playing a puzzle game that requires ordering 8 letters into a word, and I’m totally stuck. As soon as I look at a hint of what the first letter is, I can instantly find the word.
This seems wrong. In theory, I expect I can just iterate through each of the 8 letters, tell myself that’s the first one, and then look for the word, and move on if the word isn’t there. If it took me 2 seconds to “see the word” for a given starting letter (so, not quite insta-, budgeting some context switching time) then I ought to be able to reliably find the word within 16 seconds. Yet, I find that I can’t do it even with a much greater time budget. It’s almost like the “not being sure” if each particular letter I’m iterating through is actually the starting one reduces my mental horsepower and prevents me from earnestly trying to find the word, almost like I expect to feel some mental pain from whole-heartedly looking for something that may not be there.
So I’m truly stuck, and then when I get the hint, I’m insta-unstuck. I’ve had the same feeling when solving other puzzles or even math problems: I (with high confidence) know the superset from which the beginning of the solution is drawn, yet iterating through the superset does not make the solution pop to mind. However, once I get a hint that tells me *for sure* what the beginning of the solution is, I can solve the rest of it.
What gives? How to fix? Does this have implications outside of puzzles, in the more open-ended world of e.g. looking to make new friends, or to find a great business model?
(Putting this into Grok tells me it doesn’t have a name but it’s a commonly known thing in the puzzle-solving community, of which I’m not part.)
There’s a particular type of cognitive failure that I reliably experience, which seems like a pure kind of misconfiguration of the mind, and which I’ve found very difficult to will myself to not experience, which feels like some kind of fundamental limitation.
The quickest way to illustrate this is with an example: I’m playing a puzzle game that requires ordering 8 letters into a word, and I’m totally stuck. As soon as I look at a hint of what the first letter is, I can instantly find the word.
This seems wrong. In theory, I expect I can just iterate through each of the 8 letters, tell myself that’s the first one, and then look for the word, and move on if the word isn’t there. If it took me 2 seconds to “see the word” for a given starting letter (so, not quite insta-, budgeting some context switching time) then I ought to be able to reliably find the word within 16 seconds. Yet, I find that I can’t do it even with a much greater time budget. It’s almost like the “not being sure” if each particular letter I’m iterating through is actually the starting one reduces my mental horsepower and prevents me from earnestly trying to find the word, almost like I expect to feel some mental pain from whole-heartedly looking for something that may not be there.
So I’m truly stuck, and then when I get the hint, I’m insta-unstuck. I’ve had the same feeling when solving other puzzles or even math problems: I (with high confidence) know the superset from which the beginning of the solution is drawn, yet iterating through the superset does not make the solution pop to mind. However, once I get a hint that tells me *for sure* what the beginning of the solution is, I can solve the rest of it.
What gives? How to fix? Does this have implications outside of puzzles, in the more open-ended world of e.g. looking to make new friends, or to find a great business model?
(Putting this into Grok tells me it doesn’t have a name but it’s a commonly known thing in the puzzle-solving community, of which I’m not part.)