I recently received this in an email from a friend:
Test your IQ with the question below:
There is a mute who wants to buy a toothbrush. By imitating the action of
brushing one's teeth he successfully expresses himself to the shopkeeper
and the purchase is done. Now if there is a blind man who wishes to buy
a pair of sunglasses, how should he express himself?
Think about this before scrolling down for the answer...
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(Don't get thrown off by asking “why would a blind man need sunglasses.” The blind sometimes wear them because their eyes may look unusual to a sighted person.)
Now, if you still don't have an answer, think some more. If you do have an answer, keep reading.
If you still don't have an answer (or even if you do), let me ask the question this way:
“If there is a blind man who wishes to buy a pair of
sunglasses, how should he express himself?”
I suspect that the answer will jump out at you. (If you already had the answer, I suspect that you would have come to an answer quicker if the question had just been asked that way.)
If you still don't have an answer, here it is:
“The blind person just has to open his mouth and ask.”
I am not posting this just for the riddle. There's an important problem-solving principle behind the way that the two questions were asked. The first formulation gave information that probably misled you. You may have gotten the answer with the first formulation, but you more likely got the answer with the second formulation, and, again, if you had the answer with the first question, you probably would have gotten it quicker with the second one.
If you give the question to someone else, but only give the second formulation without including the preface about the mute person, the person you give the question to will probably think you need a psychiatric evaluation. That's how obvious the answer will be.
I have seen this type of example – of first information misdirecting a thought process – given in a book. However, instead of words, the problem was to put a puzzle together. When the parts were first displayed in one order, it was very hard to come up with a solution. However, when the parts were displayed in another order, the solution was obvious.
That's why sometimes, when you have what appears to be an apparently unsolvable problem, it helps to talk with someone else about it. The other person may see a solution because she is not focusing on the extraneous information that may be clouding your mind. And even if you give the misleading information first, it may be that your helper will not put as much importance on the extraneous information as you have done.
I will be leaving this posting open for comments for a short time – at least until the spammers find the posting. I would appreciate any comments you might have, including, perhaps, the technical psychological term for what I have described.