Introduction
EXPERIMENTS, MULTIMEDIA AND PUZZLES
r Mhroughout this book you will come across experiments to try, multimedia references to track down, and puzzles to solve. You can get additional information at www.jamestagg.com/ understanding.
If you undertake an experiment I would appreciate your leaving a note of your results on the website and making useful comments on the blog.
Most of the experiments and puzzles are quick and simple. The puzzles I have set often benefit from creative thinking. I have made finding the answers to these problems a little hard, so you are not tempted to cheat. I want you to try to solve the problems and ‘feel’ your brain working.
This book argues that intuitive thought solves problems in a different way to analytical thought. The process takes time and often benefits from putting a problem to one side while you use your mind to process foreground tasks. I hope you read this book at a time when the website is not available — or at least don't peek. Give your intuitive thought processes time to work.
Graham Wallas described the process of creative thinking in 1926 and I think it is still one of the best models we have:
First you must prepare and become fully acquainted with the problem. It might seem impossible but don't despair, just commit to it. Next, you should leave the problem to stew — incubation, he called it. After a while, you will feel a solution is at hand. You don’t quite have it yet but you are
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