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How to Solve an Impossible Problem
Tap into your hidden brain network that’s designed to solve the unsolvable
My patient, an 11-year-old boy, was complaining of arm pain. At first, I thought it was from doing too many pushups with poor form. But something wasn’t adding up, so I sent for blood work.
In the meantime, I kept ruminating. I knew that somewhere in the avalanche of details in this patient’s case was the key to making the diagnosis. I just had to find it. But I was hitting a wall, my schedule was packed, and I had no time to focus on the problem at hand.
We’ve all been there: An especially tricky problem stops us in our tracks, disrupting the flow of our creative work, stalling our professional progress, or thwarting our best parenting efforts.
When your first effort to solve it fails, you might think the path to success is just to work harder. You might try strategies like breaking down the issue analytically, doing research, or running a brainstorming meeting. If you can’t see the answer, you keep looking at the problem.
All these problem-solving techniques use the brain’s prefrontal cortex, the home of our executive-function network. That’s where we plan, focus, and stay task-oriented. But when we continue working directly on a difficult problem, we’re…
