Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

by Rory Sutherland

The types of intelligence prized by education and by evolution seem to be very different. Moreover, the kind of skill that we tend to prize in many academic settings is precisely the kind that is easiest to automate. Remember, your GPS is computationally much more capable than you are. Here’s a typical school maths question: Two buses leave the same bus station at noon. One travels west at a constant 30mph, while the other travels north at a constant 40mph. At what time will the buses be 100 miles apart?* Here’s a typical real-life problem: I need to catch a plane leaving Gatwick at 8am. Should I get there by train, taxi or car? And at what time should I leave the house? The odd thing about the human mind is that many people would find the first question difficult, and the second easy, yet the second question is computationally far more complex. This says more about the evolution of our brains than the difficulty of the problem. The reason is that the first question is tailor-made for computation, being what you might call a ‘narrow context’ problem. It assumes an artificially simplified, regularised world (where buses miraculously travel at a constant speed), it involves very few variables (all of which are numerically expressible, and allow for no ambiguity) and it has one single, incontrovertibly correct answer. The question of how to get to Gatwick is what you might call a ‘wide context’ problem. It allows for vagueness and multiple right answers, and it doesn’t demand...

Problem solving