Test Your Mental Alertness -Brainteasers

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You may have seen this before but there is really no harm in trying it again.

The objective is to test your mental sharpness, answer the following questions (and do not peek at the answers till you are through answering the questions):

1. Johnny’s mother had three children. The first child was named April. The second child was named May. What was the third child’s name?

2. A clerk at a butcher shop stands five feet ten inches tall and wears size 13 sneakers. What does he weigh?

3. Before Mt. Everest was discovered, what was the highest mountain in the world?

4. How much dirt is there in a hole that measures two feet by three feet by four feet?

5. What word in the English language is always spelled incorrectly?

6. Billie was born on December 28th, yet her birthday always falls in the summer. How is this possible?

7. In Nigeria, you cannot take a picture of a man with a wooden leg. Why not?

8. If you were running a race and you passed the person in 2nd place, what place would you be in now?

9. Which is correct to say, “The yolk of the egg is white” or “The yolk of the egg are white?”

10. A farmer has five haystacks in one field and four haystacks in another. How many haystacks would he have if he combined them all in one field?

Did your answers / answering process feature some of the following?

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Question 1: ...June..after all, April is followed by May and May followed by June..

Question 2, did you Google for formula for calculating weight?

Question 3, you probably tried checking Google again for the highest mountain before Mt Everest was discovered...hmm

Question 7, Never heard that before, of course you can take pictures freely..

Question 8, ...First position of course!

Question 9, Did your brain automatically start correcting the verb, making you to miss the more vital information embedded?..Typical of the human brain.

Question 10, I bet your answer is 9...simple arithmetic...you're unarguably a genius

Answers

1. Johnny.

2. Meat.

3. Mt. Everest. It just wasn’t discovered yet.

4. There is no dirt in a hole.

5. Incorrectly (except when it is spelled incorrecktly).

6. Billie lives in the southern hemisphere.

7. You can’t take a picture with a wooden leg. You need a camera to take a picture or any camera enabled appliance

8. You would be in 2nd place. (You passed the person in second place, not first, remember?)

9. Neither. Egg yolks are yellow.

10. One. If he combines all his haystacks, they all become one big stack.

Some of the questions may seem a bit tricky, but they just illustrate the several brain idiosyncrasies that affect our decision making process in our daily activities.

I also goofed on some of the questions too, and I guess it's alright to do that a couple of times so long as the information manages to seep in.

Due to the way our brain works, we have a tendency to see only what we want to see and this has huge implications especially if you are in the business world where you have to relate with customers, competitors, etc. Also if you are in a position to influence or make critical decisions then it becomes a big issue.

This may make us miss competitive threats to our  (business) existence because we cannot simply read between the lines. We tend to miss opportunities because our brain is attuned to how things used to be, what has been working for us and because we only see what we expect to see.

Our brain has been programmed to rebel against information gaps, so we more often than not, jump at the the first answer or solution that looks likely or good rather than first analyzing and processing the information available. This is especially true in a world where we receive more information everyday than we have time to process.

We end up missing opportunities because we only see what has worked in the past rather than what could be. And we miss major market shifts and changes in customer needs that seem obvious in hindsight but are easily overlooked when focusing on what we already know.

Now we have gained a little insight into how our brain works, we should pause from time to time and consider, analyze and evaluate information to find out what we are missing; this include inforamtion or data we unconsciously screen out. Simply put, always read between the lines, of course we have heard that countless times.

Okay, lesson over.

Cultivate the habit of teasing your brain, you would be amazed at what you are going to start seeing, probably information that has been staring you in the face all along.

Enjoy your weekend, beautiful people.