Connect the Circles (Feb. 9)

Subsequent to last week's spaghetti marshmallow change, in this class we encountered another challenge. The three rules were all simple and straightforward. Overall I did not perform too well, and this exercise exposed my inflexible brain. As we proceeded through the challenge, and the number of lines decreased, the difficulty did not change. You would think that as we get accustomed to the exercise, the complexity would diminish, but it was quite literally the opposite. In the beginning, we had unconsciously made ample rules in our brains that halted any creativity to happen. So by the second round, I had understood that we need to be thinking outside of the box and eliminate the imaginary rules we have created. Nonetheless, I did not get any better. Even if I was able to come up with a successful pattern, it was a derivative from the prior solution Mr.Paterson introduced. I was astonished at how inflexible my thinking ability was, and contrarily the flexibility of young kids. It is disappointing that as we get older, there are so many factors that excessively trigger our brains and prevent us from generating a novel idea. 

Mr.Paterson elucidated his experience with other audiences, ranging from kids to policemen. As I had imagined, policemen did not perform well when Mr.Paterson did the same exercise. Moreover, teachers who are usually the ones giving rules to students, and therefore following it themselves, also did poorly. Not everyone in society obtains the ability to constantly follow rules. And there are definitely advantages for those who can follow rules, but in this case, that ability did not come in handy. I find that this is such a dilemma, and I wonder how people could simultaneously follow rules, be mature enough to understand "common sense" while growing their imagination and creativity. Another point I was curious about when doing this exercise was how accurately these experiments reflect our behaviors in a real-life situation. I wonder if adults could be experts in coming up with new ideas in marketing for their job, but still perform poorly in this challenge. As simple as these exercises are, researching about them and what they prove could be really intriguing and deep.