RIGHT TURN
Do not give in to 'mental blocks'
|
Mental blocks prevent one from innovative thinking. To come out of it, a student has to sharpen his skills in logical thinking, arithmetic and communication
|
BREAK TO LAZINESS: Creativity of any sort is welcome.
"A, B and C are the three suspects in a bank robbery. A and B pleaded innocence. C said B is guilty. Among the three, only if one is telling the truth, who is the culprit?" is the question asked in an aptitude test for recruitment in one of the top IT organisations.
Without going for an immediate answer given underneath, try to solve it. Like our body, if mind does not get regular exercises, it also becomes rigid. A person's world is created by his mind. When we stop having fun using our mind with creative ideas and with new possibilities, we become mentally inflexible and this is called "Mental Block".
There are many mental obstructions that keep us from innovative thinking, first being laziness. The other blocks are fear, habit, lack of direction and enthusiasm.
Cerebral laziness is more harmful than physical laziness, particularly to students. Secondly, learning new things involves confrontation with the unknown which results in fear. The only way to combat fear is to travel through it. "Fear knocked the door. Courage opened it. Nobody was outside..." is one of the best quotes I have ever read.
When a student tries to solve a problem, fear of doing a mistake makes him hesitate and stop working further. One should know that mistake is different from failure. Never associate `breakdown' with `collapse'.
To come out of the mental blocks, a student has to sharpen his expertise in three different fields -- logical thinking, arithmetic dexterity and communication expertise. These skills not only help in his/her aptitude tests but in regular life also.
Logical proficiency
A mother has stolen bread for her child. Argue on her behalf and again on behalf of the shopkeeper. Will your arguments differ if she steals from a jewellery shop for her son's education? Logic is a branch of philosophy that administers analyses and inference. Logical thinking visualises the problem from all angles and leads to maturity.
Normally, people stop at their first conclusion that is good to their logic.
When a person stops at the `good', he misses the `best'. When you are to solve a problem, first analyse it. Build up your power of inference, stretch your imagination and look beyond the obvious.
A dwarf moves up to tenth floor in the lift and starts walking from there to reach his office at the fifteenth floor. Why? Immediately the `best' answer that strikes us is... he being a dwarf cannot raise his finger to press the fifteenth floor button. But there may be many other reasons. He may be interested in exercise and feels like walking while admiring the visual beauty from the tenth floor.
Before going for work, he may want to spend some time every day with his friend working at tenth floor. Or he may like other people think that he is working at the tenth floor where a prestigious office is located.
Some tips
While appearing for aptitude tests, leave your other problems outside and engage in working out the problem before you. Take your time. Never rush. It takes some time to enter into deeper layers of concentration. With this backdrop let us solve the question of bank robbery.
If C is the robber, A and B are telling the truth. If B is the culprit, A and C are speaking genuinely. If A is the thief, only B is telling the truth. The question says that `only one person' is telling the truth, and hence A is the robber.
Based on the above inference, try to solve the following problem that was posed at an M. N. C interview. A bottle contains sweets, another cookies and the third has a mixture of both of them. All labels were wrongly pasted. Without looking into the bottles, and just by taking one piece from any one of it, how can you re-paste the labels correctly?
YANDAMOORI VEERENDRANATH
www.yandamoori.com
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Education Plus
Karnataka
Chennai
Coimbatore
Hyderabad
Madurai
Tiruchirapalli
Vijayawada
Visakhapatnam
