What Makes Problem Solving So Difficult?
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This is a difficult question to answer right away. So the issue might be best highlighted through a story – a story that is representative of all great problem solving efforts from which we may gain the necessary insights to consistently succeed in problem solving.
This is a story of Werner Heisenberg (1901 – 1976) know for his famous Uncertainty Principle one of the three great insights that shaped the birth and development of Quantum Mechanics. The story is about how he confronted the problem and ultimately got the answer to the riddle that plagued him for long.
In the early 1920s, as a student of Arnold Sommerfeld he met Danish physicist Neil Bohr. Together they went for long walks and hikes into the mountains just to discuss some of the intractable problems of physics. They both were aware of the limitations of existing theories to explain the quantum nature of matter. They both understood that there is a problem waiting to be solved but did not know what the solution might be and how would it come about.
Following such deep intellectual inquiry and serious thoughts young Heisenberg literally plunged himself in the most arduous theoretical research for months leaving him more confused and frustrated than before.
The intensity of trying to look at the problem from existing frameworks was so hard on the young man that he succumbed to a severe attack of Hay Fever. That forced him out of his studies to go for a retreat to the treeless island of Helgoland (I simply love the name; sounds like go to Hell!). He spent his days relaxing and swimming when suddenly, as if by chance, he experienced the giddy sensation of looking down into the heart of nature to clearly see the secret that eluded him so far - the secret that forms the very basis of quantum theory.
Elated by this almost mystical experience he came rushing back to Copenhagen to meet Bohr and as they say the rest was history…. to give birth to a new era of human understanding of Nature.
What does this story teach us?
When we look at any problem it immediately brings up an ‘observer’ and the ‘observed’. The ‘observer’ is trying to look at a problem (the observed). What separates the two? Naturally the two are separated by space. And within this space there is time – a psychological time, which is nothing but thoughts that try to connect the present with the past and conjure up a future solution. Obviously, to look at a problem in this manner would lead us nowhere. It is false.
The next important question to ask is: Are the ‘observer’ and the ‘observed’ related in some way? Paradoxically the answer is no. The observed is an image. The ‘observer’ by maintaining distance from the ‘observed’ brings up his/her stored images in the brain by the help of which he/she tries to make sense of the observed. So, how can these two distinct images (one of the observer and the other of the observed) relate and communicate? Obviously they can’t and therefore there exists no relationship between the observed and the observer so long space and psychological time filled with stored images/thoughts are maintained.
Can we relate this phenomenon to our story? Yes, in the first part of Heisenberg’s effort to observe nature he was desperately trying to do so through his intellectual efforts (no doubt he was endowed with great intellect) and he repeatedly failed to see anything worthwhile. Why was that? Because his intellect was drawing up images he had stored in his brain for a long time through his intensive study and research. And those images simply refused to map onto the new image of nature. The images were simply out of sync. The two images simply refused to talk to each other.
Now when he abandoned all of those images and was relaxing in the lap of nature he suddenly saw the only image that was to be seen and explored – the new image of nature and immediately he made his connection to it and explored it without the baggage of his past images. So not only the space between the observed and the observer collapsed the thoughts or images of the past also vanished. In this state of observation the ‘observer’ and the ‘observed’ become one and the same, merging into one another. And that gave him the necessary insight to proceed further to give shape to what he found.
That is then the first and foremost trick in trying to solve any problem – seamless merger of the ‘observer’ and the ‘observed’.
Without that happening we are bound to go round in circles trapped by our own mental images unable to go anywhere near to the problem. What comes out of such hovering around is plain garbage fit to be consigned to the waste bin.
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