First solve these practice problems (don’t try looking in the back—the answers aren’t there):
• Problem #1: You have three jars. Jar A holds 9 units of water, jar B holds 40 units, and jar C holds 2 units. How can you measure exactly 20 units?
• Problem #2: Jar A holds 32 units, jar B holds 90 units, and jar C holds 4 units. How can you measure 50 units?
• Problem #3: Jar A holds 21 units, jar B holds 127 units, and jar C holds 3 units. How can you measure exactly 100 units?
Now solve this test problem:
• Test: Jar A holds 6 units, jar B holds 78 units, and jar C holds 22 units. How can you measure 28 units?
Chances are, you started with 78, subtracted 2-times-22, and then subtracted another 6 (B–2C–A). That’s the technique you learned by doing those three practice problems. But there’s another solution: just add 22 and 6 (A + C).
Don’t feel stupid. This water jar experiment by Abraham Luchins (1942) is a classic demonstration of the Einstellung effect: Your previous experience makes the new problem more difficult.
And the Einstellung effect isn’t confined to water jars. It leaps the laboratory, showing up in situations like chess. We apply the solutions that worked in the past even when better solutions are available.
Or, certain people do.
To have previous solutions to fall back on requires some expertise. And so experts fall into the Einstellung trap: They use familiar, nonoptimal solutions (while nonexperts—with less expertise—use new, nonoptimal solutions).
But something interesting happens when chess players reach a certain level of expertise: they stop getting sucked into the Einstellung trap. At the stage of Zen chess enlightenment, the mind again becomes as flexible as the uncarved block, and masters look past familiarity and into optimal solutions, be they in or out of the box.
Neurological Explanation of the Einstellung Effect
Why do we fall back on the familiar ways we’ve done things, even when these solutions aren’t the best? One explanation is neuroplasticity: Over time, you physically rewire your brain for this solution.
Here’s how it works: Neurons that play together stay together. Or, neurons in a pathway that fire together learn to fire together more efficiently. This pathway becomes quicker on a basic, biological level. And so this pathway beats out other, competing pathways, even when the other pathways might have been naturally quicker before all the rewiring started.