The Power of “Puzzler’s Mind”

Image by Çiğdem Onur from Pixabay

Developing Learner’s Mind in an adult requires skeptical scrutiny of some deeply entrenched habits. These habits have brought you a measure of success, but they will prevent you from reaching your cognitive potential. A willingness to regularly explore new knowledge can be a source of delight as you invigorate your suppressed curiosity. Who knows? Exploration may even lead to solutions to your most difficult cognitive puzzles!

The transcript of the podcast on “Puzzler’s Mind” is found below along with links to sources:

“This season I am endeavoring to help you acquire the dispositions that lead to Learner’s Mind. All of us were born with Beginner’s Mind which optimized our exploration of the brave new world we were born into. We made enormous progress mastering concepts and language in just the first few years of our lives. But, over time we tended to shift to the mindset neuroscientists call exploitation. We knew a good deal and it was efficient to use our existing knowledge to solve problems. The dilemma is that we lost the inclination to explore in our quest for efficiency. In the bargain our curiosity withered.

Curiosity is the ultimate driver of all learning. Curiosity can operate to a degree within the constraints of exploitation, but it is only when we give curiosity a long leash to explore that we realize its’ real power. Learner’s Mind embraces exploration as a regular part of our waking hours. The adult mind can utilize the power of exploration without falling victim to the inefficiency of unregulated curiosity. This purposeful toggling between exploration and exploitation is the rhythm that you must intentionally cultivate if you are going to develop Learner’s Mind.

Not convinced? I’m not surprised. Join me and let me see if I can change your mind.

Your adult life has been dominated by mining your existing knowledge, especially when you’re under time pressure to produce. But think about when a solution eluded you as the clock continued to tick. Your existing knowledge base was failing you. What to do?

I was in this situation in graduate school during my doctoral research. The solution to a pivotal problem in my experimental design continued to elude me month after month. The germ of the solution finally came unbidden when I was mowing grass on a warm Saturday afternoon. One of my nephews who is a graphic designer told me of a time when he and a group of colleagues faced with a looming deadline went to a local park and spent an hour swinging on the swings! Were they in denial trying to avoid the problem? I think you know the answer. A change of environment may be the needed catalyst to “think outside the box.” Many of our best ideas come to us in the shower or while we are doing something else trivial that doesn’t demand significant intellectual resources.

Writer’s block is a classic illustration of the limitations of mining your existing store of ideas.

Doubling down on exploitation seldom wins the day. Turning the screws by intensifying your focus on what you already know is more successful at producing tension headaches than solving problems. ”Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.“ —  [Gene Fowler Attributed without citation in Janice R. Matthews et al. (2000) Successful Scientific Writing. p. 53. Sometimes attributed to Douglas Adams.]

A better approach is to pivot to exploration. J K Rowling acknowledges the city of Edinburgh in Scotland (where she has lived since 1993) as catalytic to her writing. “Edinburgh is very much home for me and is the place where Harry evolved over seven books and many, many hours of writing in its cafés.” Although Rowling denies specific influences, aspects of Edinburgh Castle, tombstones in Greyfriar’s Kirk graveyard, and the layout of certain streets have strong echoes in her books. It is not unlikely that these were at least unconscious inspirations. Even writing in a café keeps a writer from getting too deep into exploitation. The regular coming and going of customers and the activity of the staff can catalyze exploration.

A new 2022 book by A J Jacobs called The Puzzler challenges its readers to develop Puzzler’s Mind. I would maintain that Puzzler’s Mind is one of the dispositions of Learner’s Mind. Here’s how Jacobs describes Puzzler’s Mind:

“The puzzler mindset is all about curiosity. About everything—about politics, other people’s experiences, literature, life. One of the many lessons I learned from years of doing puzzles is that it is much easier to solve a puzzle or a problem when your mind is flexible and when you’re in a kind of playful mood. The key is asking questions instead of having a predetermined opinion.” (THE WEEK, May 20, 2022, p. 23.)

There are echoes here of Watson and Crick in their free-wheeling model building that led to the structure of DNA and the Nobel Prize. Flexibility and a playful mind coupled with insatiable curiosity in pursuit of answering a question is a good way to summarize the power of exploration. I’ve broken down curiosity into its component parts this season. Attention—>Perception—>Focus

Puzzler Mindset adds to these the desire to solve a puzzle. The puzzle may be a problem, a search for a cause or for an explanation. The Puzzler, Jacobs says, “is asking questions instead of … [trying to validate] a predetermined opinion.” The best questions are usually “how” or “why”? Questions are so important that the next season of this podcast will be devoted to them.

Our minds are wired to want to solve problems. Why else would games be so popular? Crossword puzzles, Sudoku, and Wordle are intrinsic parts of many people’s daily routines. Chess and checkers and card games and board games galore occupy leisure time and games are often the focal point of parties.

I am not personally motivated by games or word puzzles mainly because others are so competitive over what are often games of chance or recall of trivia. I do succumb, however, to a good jigsaw puzzle.

Jigsaw puzzles are a good analogy for the dynamic that is Learner’s Mind.

Efficient assembly of a jigsaw puzzle involves both focused exploration and exploitation. A recent day-long family celebration saw five family members (four adults and one teen) teaming up to assemble a 1000-piece puzzle of moderate difficulty in under two hours. No one was watching the clock and we didn’t compete. A good time was had by all!

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If you do jigsaw puzzles, you probably operate like we did. We start puzzle building by exploring the contents of the puzzle box looking for patterns. Edge pieces, blue for ocean or sky, white for clouds, boards and windows of buildings, face of people—each is put in a different location on the table. In our case the five of us each took custody of one set of pieces. Constructing this set is like exploration mode. As the pieces in each category accumulate sufficiently, we switch into something akin to exploitation mode. We try to fit as many pieces as possible together from our accumulated set. Like cognitive exploitation we are mining what we already have. We do this as long as we are making reasonable progress.

Inevitably after a time we find it harder and harder to find a home for the pieces that remain, and we then switch back into exploration mode. This time as we look for pieces of a face or windows in a building etc. among the unsorted pieces, we typically recognize a few new pieces very quickly as the solution to gaps we were unable to fill. This toggling back and forth between fitting together pieces of our existing collection and stopping to look for new pieces continues, and our part of the solved puzzle grows. We may begin to see where our section intersects with what someone else has built and we can slide our whole section into place. As the gaps in our section are filled, it becomes easier to determine what to explore for and soon there is a mad dash to put the few remaining pieces in place.

Just this morning homeschooling with my four-year-old grandson went through this explore-exploit rhythm. Joshua was trying to recall words that start with the letter B. An obvious one was the insect we call a bee. Since he loves nature, we challenged him to draw a bee using a picture as a guide. We then talked over the distinctives of a bee including the six legs that make it an insect.

We noticed pollen on the body of the bee in the picture and that led to Joshua’s question: what is the pollen for? The reflexive adult answer has to do with plant pollination and that’s certainly important. However, Joshua was looking for something related to the reality that the bee invariably takes some pollen back to the hive. Is pollen an incidental with no benefit to bees? That’s what exploiting the standard narrative about plant pollination would lead us to think. Exploitation would emphasize the bee as a purposeful collector of nectar and an incidental collector of pollen. In going after nectar from many flowers, the bee redistributes pollen and causes cross pollination which is essential for genetic diversity in plants as well as in moving pollen from male flowers to female flowers in some species. Exploitation might easily say at this point, bees are pollinators and that’s very good. Case closed.

Joshua guessed that pollen is used by bees to make honey. Honey and bees are intricately intertwined—just ask Winnie the Pooh. Honey is derived from the action of bee saliva on nectar. Pollen is not involved. Honey is almost entirely simple sugars (fructose and glucose in that order) with some water and minerals.

Does pollen serve some other purpose? As we explored this question, we quickly learned something else: pollen contains a significant amount of protein 2.5–61 %.

The wide variation is dependent on the type of plant and the health of the plant. Typical protein values in one extensive study of pollen ranged from 8.4-18.1%.

Pollen contains a variety of other nutrients including lipids. Bees need proteins and lipids to build their bodies. Sugar alone won’t suffice for bees any more than for humans. The health of a hive of bees requires good nutrition and balanced nutrition requires proteins and lipids in addition to sugar.

If pollen is the main source of nutrients besides the sugar in honey, can incidental pollen meet the need of the hive? The answer is a resounding No. Bees collect large amounts of pollen on purpose. The pollen that sticks to their bodies is brushed by the forelegs (by the head) that are moistened with salvia/nectar from the mouth. This brushing is toward the hind legs where there is a polished cavity called the pollen basket which is purposefully packed with pollen. The pollen mass in the basket is secured by a single hair across the opening.

By Muhammad Mahdi Karim - Own work, GFDL 1.2, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6699147

The pollen in this basket is sometimes called bee bread or, more commonly bee pollen. Bee pollen is packed with nutrients that the bee colony requires (especially nurse bees) to produce more bees to sustain the hive.

This is a good illustration of the role of healthy focused exploration driven by a good question and curiosity. Without this exploration we might easily settle for a superficial view. Exploitation came into play as we worked with a more complete set of ideas to come up with a much better sense of how the anatomy and behavior of bees benefits bees and not just plants.

In our journey we enriched our concept of pollen to include bee nutrition. We could easily go farther. Pollen is rich in protein and foreign proteins evoke the strongest allergic responses in humans. If you’re allergic to various kinds of pollen, you can blame pollen proteins. As we explore, we continue to find new connections that enlarge our conceptions. Concepts are not static.”

Concept formation and enlargement are usually the result of exploration. Mining your existing conceptual framework may fail to yield solutions to the problems you are trying to solve, because you lack one or more of the crucial ideas. In the next several blogs we will explore concept formation and how to be more effective and intentional in your ideation.