Your Brain: The Missing Manual

Problem Solving

Critical thinking is the best tool when you need to challenge a daft idea with withering logic. Critical thinking excels at testing, challenging, and dissecting minute details. But it isn't the right instrument if you need to create something new or get a fresh perspective on a perplexing problem.

Consider the following challenge. The game is hangman, and the category is films. The goal is to guess the movie title by filling in the four blanks underneath the gallows before exhausting all your guesses.

Figure 7-5. 

In a typical game of hangman, one body part is drawn in after each wrong guess. At its most challenging, only six guesses are allowed (one head, one torso, two arms, and two legs), after which the hangman is complete. However, you can give yourself 10 guesses. After each guess, consult the answer key shown below to see if you've chosen correctly. Try it now (and don't continue until you want to know the answer).

Answer Key

The Letter Grid lists all the letters of the alphabet, with a number after each one. If you wish to guess a letter, make note of this number and look it up in the Position Grid underneath to get a second number. This second number indicates either the position of the letter in the puzzle or 0, which means the letter doesn't appear in the answer. For example, in the Letter Grid the number for A is 1. In the Position Grid, position number 1 gives ...