Tap Into Your Social Brain

Let's look at this logic problem:

Try to determine the answer.

Hint: It's presented visually to try to trick you (as we saw last time).

The answer is two cards, the A and the 3.

Try this one:

You are a police officer enforcing this law:

It is only legal for minors to drink non-alcoholic beverages.

You are busy, so you need to quickly assess each bar with the minimum amount of checks.

You walk into a bar, and you see this scene:

There are four people in the bar. One is a teenage boy, but you can't see his drink. One is an old man, and you can't see his drink. The third person has a coke¹, but he/she is behind a column so you can't see their age. The last person has a big pint of beer, but he/she is also blocked by a column.

Did you get the answer? You need to check two people. You don't need to check the old man, he's obviously not a minor. You don't need to check the person with a coke, even though he might be underage. That leaves the other two. The teenage boy on the left might have an alcoholic drink (which you can't see), and the person you can't see has a beer, so he/she might be a minor.

Was that easier? Would it surprise you if I told you that the card problem and the bar problem are equivalent?² Why is it easier to solve the bar problem with almost no effort?

There are two reasons: one, it calls on years of built-up, real-world experience. Second, the problem is social--that is, it is about people. We humans are built to handle complex relationships between people. Our reasoning power is somehow magnified and clarified when phrased in terms of people in a familiar situation.

Moral: When possible present a logic problem as a problem people have no difficulty solving.

What's interesting is that you instantly know the shape of the solution when presented with the bar version of the problem. You think "I'm looking for minors and alcoholic beverages." Whereas my first reaction to the card version was "I'm looking for vowels and even numbers" (which is wrong). Only after careful, slow, deliberate thinking was I able to see that I should be looking for vowels and odds.

If you present material in the right way, it will help you teach the material better. You've likely had this experience before. Did your teacher ever do a math problem in terms of buying something and making change? Somehow, kids who score poorly in math class can still do the same problem when it's presented as a human-to-human exchange!

Social problems are not the only ones that we are hyper-capable of solving. There are also other situations that we are hardwired to understand better than symbolic puzzles. Spatial orientation (for instance, that the arm sticking out from behind the column is attached to a person) and movement are also easy to solve, and luckily some of the most interesting math problems are equivalent to orientation and motion.

By converting a symbolic problem to one that is a familiar, real-world situation, you are tapping into many different parts of the brain. The key to a good logic-to-social conversion is whether the problem solver can properly simulate the situation themselves. The bar problem is good because it's something we can all imagine.

This is one thing I try to take advantage of in my videos. Yes, you are learning Clojure to solve a very complex problem. However, the problem is familiar to most, as it involves many metaphors and simulated situations. You are teaching someone to bake. A function is like a recipe. Pure functions are like doing a calculation in your head. Side effects move you around or use up ingredients, etc. I worked hard to make it seamless to learn.

Now that we know that it's easier to learn something if we can already simulate it, the next question is how to convert math/logic problems from their symbolic form into something more suitable for whole-brain simulation. This post is long enough already, so I'll address that next time.

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Why technical explanation alone is not enough

Here's a problem you might see on a standardized test:

Go ahead and try to solve it. Choose an answer.

When people answer this question on a test, the most common answer is C. Yellow triangle and red square. They try to make the statement false by negating all of the colors.

This is wrong. Actually, the correct answer is A. It is the only one that makes the statement false. Why?

This is a propositional logic problem. The colors and shapes are a red herring. The rule for implication (if-then statement) is:

An implication is false if the antecedant is true and the consequent is false.

Kind of boring and therefore hard to understand if you don't already know the rule. It is unlikely that any amount of explanation will help, though you should try to understand if you don't already. Here, try this. If the triangle isn't red, then the statement doesn't apply, so it is true by irrelevance. That eliminates C and D. B obviously makes the statement true, so it must be A.¹

Researchers found that explanations alone do not help. I read an article² about a study where similar questions were asked to a group of students. The students were hooked up to EEG (Electroencephalography) machines to measure what parts of their brains were active during each question. They also asked them to say which ones they thought they got right.

What they found was that most of the people who answered A were using their frontal and temporal lobes: the parts of the brain responsible for logic, reasoning, and language. Most of the people who answered C were using their occipital lobes, which is responsible for vision.

Moral #1: Recognize what type of problem you need to solve. If possible, use the right part of your brain for that problem.

The people who used their vision centers were doing visual pattern matching, looking for shapes and colors. This is typical of a fight-or-flight response, where you are running from a tiger and need to quickly spot it in the jungle.

Moral #2: Don't get nervous during a test. Anxiety makes some parts of your brain more active--usually the wrong ones.

In addition, the people who used their vision center to answer the question thought they got the answer right just as much as the people who actually got it right.

Moral #3: The different parts of your brain are good at different tasks. If you ask the occipital lobe to do pattern matching, it will, and it will think it did a good job--even if it is not a pattern matching task.

The second part of the study tried to teach those who got it wrong to do it better next time. They broke them into a control group and an experimental group. The control group got an explanation like the boring one above on how to make an implication false. The experimental group got the same explanation plus they were trained with a little bio-feedback to use the right part of the brain.³

The result was that the control group didn't make any gains. And they still thought they got it right. The experimental group did significantly better. They scored higher and were more likely to say they got the wrong answer when they did get the wrong answer.

Moral #4: Explanation alone is basically worthless. Even practice is not enough. The key is to recognize what type of problem it is, use the right part of your brain, and don't listen to the rest of your brain. Only then is explanation useful.

Now, this is easier said than done. I don't have an EEG machine. I've never done bio-feedback. But the idea has helped me tremendously when teaching math. It is not hard to recognize when someone is using the wrong part of their brain. First, they confidently get the wrong answer. Second, they are getting the basic mechanics of the problem wrong. They're looking for something. They find the closest thing to what they want. They're done.

Logic problems aren't about looking. They're more abstract. Common helpers for doing logic problems are mouthing words, making gestures, and looking away from the problem.

Recognizing whether someone is using the right part of their brain is easy. But now you know explaining won't help. The hard part is to get them to use the correct part of the brain. That's what I'll talk about next time.

You might also like

• How to avoid "Makes sense if you already understand it."
• Making True/False Questions Easy
• Pre-West Prep: Elena Machkasova
• Pre-West Interview: Elena Machkasova