Divining the "Creative Problem Solver Thinker" (or why it is all about Lego)

A term that popped out the other day, why is it that some of us can encounter a situation and instantly assess it, the workings of a system or the solution of a problem become clear from start to finish immediately, for SOME. There are those of us who can open the hood of a car and perceive the V6 engine with 3 gravity feed downdraft 2 barrel carburetors and a free breathing air intake capable of generating 300 horsepower while to some it is just a noisy stinky gas guzzler.  Some of us can be confronted with a pile of broken louvered door see the way to turn that over, flip some hinges, rob some hardware and hang them up again.

There is a story of the first time that an oversized truck got wedged into the Lincoln Tunnel on its way to Manhattan. The back up was enormous, hours of waiting while Port Authority personnel stood around scratching their collective heads. It came down to a young girl who looked at it and said, “Why don’t you just take the air out of the tires.” Thus lowering the height of the truck and enabling it to back out of the tube.

How is it that even intelligent individuals will leave the skating rink and spoil an afternoon because there feet hurt, rather than renting a pair of more comfortable skates?  It is an innate sensory experience that causes the Creative Problem Solver Thinker to see it and name it. Point to the bundle of wires and know they are the 5 RCA jacks for your hi-def surround sound home theater. It is kind of deconstructionist in its way.  Everything becomes its component parts and those component parts can be assembled in a variety of ways. Like Legos, which literally means “I play”, a simple 8 count brick and make a lot of different shapes but it takes da Vinci to build a bust of Lincoln…

No wait not quite that, but you get the idea.  In the hands of this type of thinker raw materials seem to lose their limits. There is an exercise in experimental psychology, which asks you (the subject) how many different uses can you come up with for that simple rectangular brick? Well?

Now, were they all toys?

I would be interested to know how many of you said no.

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