Hints and Allegations (Hallelujah)

May 1st, 2006 Fred McVittie Posted in Creativity, Enlightenment, Illumination, Problem |

This presentation will report on a trial looking at the functionality of ‘hints’ or clues in the solving of certain logical problems associated with creativity. It will be demonstrated that, in problems which require remote associations between widely different and non-obvious data sources to be forged in order for a solution to be found, the giving of a hint allows the solution to be found by a greater number of subjects than when no hint is provided, although the actual content of the hint is not necessarily significant.

Problems were given which did not respond well to deductive logical methods of solving, but rather needed a more lateral or intuitive response. An example of such a problem is as follows:

Mary and Marjory were born to the same mother and the same father on the same day of the same month of the same year, yet they are not twins. Explain.

Typically, subjects either solved the problem almost immediately, experiencing a ‘moment of illumination’, or did not solve it at all. When presented with a hint, however, many of the subjects who had previously been unable to solve the problem spontaneously came up with the solution, again experiencing the sudden flash of ‘illumination’, or even ‘enlightenment’.

A particularly interesting aspect of this research was that the actual hint itself did not need to relate to the problem at all, and a random set of prompt words, when offered as hints, had an equal level of success in prompting a successful solving of the problem. This phenomenon will be discussed and various hypotheses offered to account for this.