#ThinkfullyHabit: Forget it
Take this challenge: You have a cardboard box full of sand and some buried coins. You’re given a set of chopsticks and a spoon. Without tipping the box over or touching the sand with your hands, how do you get the coins out?
The answers you come up with will probably depend on how easily you can forget what you already know.
“The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. ”
WHY?
We can become fixated on what we already know, so much so that we create mental blocks to seeing how we can use existing things in new ways. Psychologists call it 'functional fixedness’ – a cognitive bias that can stop us using an existing idea or object in a new way. Most of us have a natural tendency for this. In fact, it’s a bias we fall into early in life. Researchers have found that while 5 year olds show no initial signs of functional fixedness when problem-solving, by the age of 7 years old it’s already kicking in.
One way to overcome this bias is simply to make the problem you are facing slightly more abstract and distil it down to its basic elements. A study conducted at Carnegie Mellon University gave two sets of people the same problem to solve. The first group were given a detailed version of the problem, the second group were given exactly the same problem but in simplified and abstract form. The researchers found that those who were given the abstracted problem were better able to identify relevant ideas and inspirations from other areas of life that helped them come up with more novel and practical solutions.
P.S. How did you solve the coin problem? If you're still wondering, the best trick is to forget what you know about chopsticks and spoons in order to avoid becoming fixated on looking for solutions that involve picking things up or scooping things out. Instead, if you are able to simply look at these items as implements or tools, you may see that you could use the chopsticks or the end of the spoon to stab lots of holes into the cardboard box through which the sand can drain out, leaving behind only the coins. Voila!
REFERENCES:
Harley, A. (2017, July 30). Functional Fixedness Stops You From Having Innovative Ideas.