The word tempo may feel out of place in a book devoted to the brain—and perhaps more in tune with melody masters like Mike Pope and Stephen Sondheim—but don’t be too fast to judge. That’s the gist in fact: thinking fast and thinking slow. Presto and lento. Your brain can do both well, but results may vary since there’s a time for speed and a time for caution. To illustrate the point, take a closer look at the puzzle below. See if the trios loosen any thoughts:
1. BUMP EGG STEP
2. PINE SAUCE CRAB
3. BULLET TOILET ROAD
4. WALL BACK CLIP
Each threesome is united by a fourth word you need to determine.
Professor Mark Beeman, now chair of psychology at Illinois’ Weinberg College at Northwestern, devised the puzzle back in 2004, asking volunteers to name the missing word per set, a word that could complete a compound word or phrase with all three members.
GOOSE is your first answer, for instance, making goosebump, goose-egg and goosestep. In trio number two, APPLE comes to the rescue, making pineapple, apple sauce and crabapple.
Notice the departure? Every goose-phrase carries the missing word in the first position, while in the apple trio the absentee is first or last. Your brain should now be on high alert. Extra wary, you’d be wise to reread those instructions: what missing word per set can make a compound word or phrase with all three members?
Now the ambiguity is evident: for each line, the missing word makes a compound, whether the keyword sits to the left or the right. Chances are your quick-thinking self neglected that detail, or made a false presumption. A rapid response can attract those problems, skimming the instructions, ignoring the manual, second-guessing what is needed. But then again, a rapid response can often solve a puzzle too. Could that be the case with trio number three—BULLET, TOILET and ROAD?
Either you saw the answer in a flash or you’re still in the dark. Intuition is a mercurial force. You and I know the power as gut instinct, while scientists such as psychologist Daniel Kahneman prefer the term of System-1 thinking—a quick and often subconscious way of operating. A Nobel laureate in economics, Kahneman coined the term some ten years ago to distinguish between two modes of cognition: the instantaneous System 1 and the more deliberate System 2. Both systems come with their own rewards.
(Have you nabbed Beeman’s BULLET trio yet?)
Operating a few degrees past word puzzles, Albert Einstein was trying to grasp the interconnection between time and space. The conundrum prompted him to say, ‘There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.’ A feeling? That’s what he said, one of history’s greatest scientists, talking about that sneaky sensation we register even when a problem seemingly calls only for logic.
So what is this feeling? How does System-1 thinking play out in the brain? And why do intuitive decisions metaphorically reside in the gut, of all places? Surely the brain is the seat of insight, not your duodenum.
Sorry, I’ve been priming you, choosing words like gut and seat to make you ponder TOILET almost unthinkingly. The missing word is TRAIN, as in bullet train, toilet train and road train. And again, this third trio takes the puzzle one step further from the apparently simple instructions: not only can the missing word sit flush left or right (okay, we can ditch the toilet allusions now), but it can also be different parts of speech. TRAIN is a noun in two of the compounds, and a verb in the other.
This added complexity makes reaching the answers even harder, if you wish to approach Beeman’s puzzle logically. Logic and reason, the natural enemies of intuition, are System-2 thinking, the stuff of analysis and protocol, a more conscious and deliberate mode. And more Neolithic too, beyond the animal impulses of System 1.
(Have you matched the final three by the way? WALL, BACK and CLIP? I’ll leave the clock running and tell you over the page.)
With gamma waves flowing, the System-2 thinker would meticulously work through each trio and recite all the variants in working memory: silver bullet, magic bullet, bullet point, rubber bullet, and so on, until an eligible candidate emerges. Nor is there anything wrong with that left-brain approach—that’s where such thinking mainly dwells. Much like an auditor, the System-2 thinker confirms every fact.
Comparatively, System 1 is a prehistoric flash, reaching a decision before it has time to be articulated. Gut feelings, to use the misnomer, largely ignite the right side of the brain, plus the limbic band deep within the cerebrum, our older core and home of emotions and long-term memory. You’ll remember this patch from Sheth’s experiment, the same segment flaring as students pounced on the matchstick puzzle solution.
Pounce. Flash. Wham. Strike. The verbs aligned with intuition all evoke speed. And speed, harking back to cave days, has been vital for survival. Our ancestors relied on their neural firing to sidestep crisis, or recognise danger as well as opportunity. And, more recently, to crack puzzles too.
After his word-trio puzzle, Professor Mark Beeman reached a conclusion that defied common sense: looking at each volunteer’s hit-rate, in tandem with their solution time, and the readouts garnered from both EEG and fMRI devices, Beeman grew to see the quicker the answer came the more likely it was to be correct. Speed in this case was a solver’s ally, as if the answer was being harpooned from the deep, rather than emerging through meticulous elimination. Beeman’s study seemed to be clear: the faster the draw, the better your score.
But wait, aren’t we taught to take our time when answering a question? Caution is every teacher’s byword. And indeed, we should be cautious about this call to abandon caution. Let’s take a closer look at tempo. If our brain is an engine, then we have two gears on offer, and both deserve to be engaged.
Upon closer assessment of the puzzle data, Beeman discovered a clear divide emerged among the solvers. No matter the puzzle, the volunteers showed a bias towards one mode of thought over the other, System 1 versus System 2. The intuitive System-1 solvers displayed a flat pattern of neural activity, their cognition emerging from the right hemisphere and spreading across the neocortex like a swarm. Meanwhile, the analysts in the experiment—the System-2 thinkers—produced a cluster pattern limited to one region of the frontal lobe. By way of success, the intuitive camp enjoyed a 94 per cent hit-rate, while the System-2 crew only managed to achieve 78 per cent. Curious to add, 34 per cent of answers submitted at the last moment were wrong, in contrast to only 10 per cent of answers speedily given being incorrect.
Trust your gut seems the moral of the story, but not every scientist is taken by the precept. Enter Daniel Kahneman. In his milestone book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman argues that System-1 thinking is mainly reserved for minutiae, the everyday dilemmas of mustard or mayonnaise, window or aisle, blue socks or brown. Being so fast, and so efficient, intuitive thinking can seem autonomous, the inner voice that calls the shots.
System-2 thinking, however, is what we apply to the Big Decisions—matters of life and mortgages. As tempting as shortcuts seem, we tend to take the slower road to reach the bigger destinations. In a way, System 2 is our brain’s handbrake, ensuring hunches don’t lead to strife. Few of us buy a home on impulse. We don’t swap careers on a whim. Instead we rationalise. We weigh the pros and cons. We overthink. In short, we filter the instincts embedded in System 1.
This is all well and good when choosing a college, a spouse, an insurance policy, but far less critical when it comes to seizing goose eggs. With little to lose you trust your gut, it seems. Though a brilliant experiment at Princeton in 2007 aimed to challenge that maxim: psychologists Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer sought to test how our thinking changes as soon as stimuli are suppressed.
In their experiment, 40 students were handed a set of questions, including this teaser:
A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total.
The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost?
It’s clear to read and just as simple to solve. So, what’s your answer?
If you guessed 10 cents, then congratulations, you fell for the trap. Sound as that System-1 response might have seemed, your impulse was off-beam. Before you revise your answer, I want you to reread the puzzle, but now presented like so:
A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total.
The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost?
Harder to read, right? The reduction in point size was not a test of eyesight but a means of retarding a solver’s perceptual fluency, the tempo it takes to perceive and understand a problem.
Across a series of puzzles, Alter and Oppenheimer discovered that nine in ten students bungled one such teaser when presented in a standard point size, yet the success rate soared the moment the point size shrank, or the text grew so faint it was barely legible.
Forced to decelerate, students got smarter. Errors dropped by a third. In short, when the brain was obliged to take the long road, its intuition was checked. System-1 thinking (reading the puzzle at speed) presumed the baseball cost 10 cents. But apply the brakes, thanks to the trouble in absorbing the question, and System-2 rightly reasoned the ball cost 5 cents.
So where does that leave us? When solving a puzzle, should we think fast or think cautiously? Will more success await the tortoise or the hare? The answer lies in the puzzle itself, as much as your own cognitive forte. Wise thinkers are aware of both approaches, as much as recognising the tempo that’s historically yielded their better results, since there’s no set speed when it comes to tackling problems.
Wallpaper, paperback and paperclip comprise the final set for Beeman’s puzzle, whether that took you a second or a minute to reach. However, all this pales next to the complex puzzle of living, to facing the grander problems that life throws your way. Nonetheless, it pays to heed both modes—the fast and the slow, the intuitive and methodical. An agile brain is vital, capable of the swoop and the stab, but also has the ability to sift and verify.
Practice helps no end—the so-called 10,000 hours of singular devotion (to violins, to juggling, to crossword clues) that becomes a practitioner’s second nature. Or to quote Einstein again, ‘Creativity is the residue of time wasted.’ After so many puzzles, whatever the puzzle, you recognise the traps. Over time, your brain develops its own gear ratio—the fast and the slow: when to follow your gut and when to be wary.
Puzzles in general help to calibrate those speeds. You will know yourself that every time you glimpse a Target puzzle, those jumble features in the paper, the nine-letter word will leap off the page in a blink, or take a good while of rearrangement. How will you fare with this one?
D E R
U H N
O G Y
Ten thousand hours of manipulating letters, or even a hundred hours, will deliver a fast-tracked answer via intuition. It must be HYDROGEN?
That’s the peril of responding too soon. Not every pounce will find the prey. HYDROGEN is a miscount. There are times for speed and times to arrest your impulses. Going a little steadier, you incorporate the U and the upshot is GREYHOUND. In many ways the secret to solving—to thinking in general—is knowing which tempo to trust.