Sharon solves a problem

An article on the brain in The Economist detailed interesting research about how people come to insights, such as suddenly remembering a name or a fact or arriving at a solution to a problem.

A task posed by researchers studying how the brain works went like this. Imagine you are in a three-storey house. There are three light switches on the wall on the ground floor. One of the switches controls a light on the second floor. At the start this bulb is off. You can switch the three switches on and off but you can only go up to the second floor, to see if the light is on, once.

So, what should you do? In the experiment volunteers were given 30 seconds to read the puzzle and 60 to 90 seconds to solve it. If they hadn´t, a hint appeared, which was that you should turn one switch on for a bit, wait, and then turn it off. Then go upstairs and feel the bulb to see whether it was warm.

This baffled us both, how was this “hint” helpful?

Sharon quickly came up with an elegant solution: “You switch the switches on one at a time and you just go outside and look up at the window of the room on the second floor to see if the light is on.”

There is no beating this logic. Presumably the guff about the one visit upstairs and feeling the heat of the bulb were pure diversions.

Sharon says: “There´s no fooling the stroke brain.”

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©Phillip Bruce 2009.