In this week's episode of NPR's "Hidden Brain," the guest, psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis, proposes a riddle to host Shankar Vedantam that sort of goes like this: If there is one lily pad in a pond (or lake) at the beginning of spring and the number of lily pads doubles every day, when does the pond (or lake) fill up completely with lily pads?
Added note: What I forgot to say when I originally posted this was that finding an answer often involves looking at the question from a different direction. The discussion revolved around how the subconscious mind knows things that the conscious mind doesn't and that sometimes it takes stepping away from thinking about the original question so that the subconscious mind has a chance to take a fresh view. One example: Sleeping on a decision before making a final choice. Further example: I realized that I needed to add this explanatory note after I woke up this morning.
About 16 hours earlier, I saw how thinking
applied from a different direction could be applied to the final results of the Friday afternoon game at the
Niagara-on-the-Lake Duplicate Bridge Club in Canada. Checking our final scores on the BridgeMate, our opponents said,
"Oh, you're fourth." To which my first-time partner Harold Nash replied that he preferred to
look at it as third ... from the bottom.
Harold is the oldest player at the game – he's 96 –
and I marveled at how sharp and delightful he is. Like in Monday's game,
another first-time partnership for me (see Blog 1197), we started out with the blessing of bad hands,
which let us get used to each other while playing defense.
Unfortunately, the blessing didn't do us much good this time. We were 45% after the first round and 45.42% at the end of the day. In the final tally, when everybody finished playing, we had advanced to second ... from the bottom.
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