Naked Science Forum
General Science => General Science => Topic started by: chris on 22/04/2017 10:13:39
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Alan, from Mexico, wants to know:
What abilities does a person need to be born with to be good at solving riddles?
What do you think?
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I would divide that into two questions: (1) what abilities are required to solve riddles, and (2) do any of those depend on skills that you would need to be born with which a large percentage of other people might lack.
The first thing to do then would be to look at some example riddles and work out what skills are required to solve them. Then you'd want to test to see if a large proportion of the population are incapable of acquiring those skills. I suspect that most of it will come down to training and patience and that anyone can acquire the required skills unless they're exceptionally dim, but you have to care enough about riddles to put the time in to crack them, and you need to be able to tolerate anything about them that's too contrived. I'm not a fan of riddles in general simply because you don't know if you're working on a good one or wasting time on a bad one until you know the answer (unless you have a high-quality riddle provider who is guaranteed to supply you with a high-quality product every time). The only riddle that comes to my mind at the moment is a Nigerian one that contains the phrase "my beard goes up" amongst other clues which I can't remember - the answer was a hut, with the smoke going up from the hole in the top of its roof being the "beard". That illustrates one key skill which involves linking things by their similarities while not being put off by their fundamental differences - it may be that autistic traits can make this harder, so that would certainly be worth investigating through experiment.
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There are theories that suggest that there are different kinds of intelligence - for example, someone may be excellent at reading maps, but hopeless at writing poetry (and vice-versa). Such people would score very differently in different types of puzzles.
There are other theories that there is a general kind of intelligence that works across all areas.
Clearly, if there was some mutation or developmental problem that impaired the way that all neurons communicate or conduct signals, that would affect many areas of cognition. But if there was a mutation or developmental problem that affected a specific area of the brain, that could impact specific skills.
So you can have someone like Oliver Sacks, who was a brilliant psychologist, but who suffered "face blindness", and was unable to recognize faces.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences
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Is it fair to say that most 'riddles' are language-based? So then, you would think anyone attempting a riddle would need to have developed a reasonable level of language comprehension (matching the language that the riddle is in). It would be quite difficult to solve a riddle prior to developing a decent vocabulary and understanding of sentence structure, or to solve one in a different language, regardless of how 'clever' you are.
Like David Cooper, I don't really enjoy riddles. I always seem to have multiple, plausible answers that are not "the answer" that they were looking for. So rather than having that "aha!" moment, I just feel annoyed.