FAQ: Challenges in thinking

5 facts about the difficulties with which the person is facing in the process of cognitive activity.

Human thought is faced with two types of difficulty. The first type - is a problem, and the second - the problem. The words "challenge" and "a problem" in the Russian and other European languages are synonymous, but from the point of view they represent a different psychology.

• 1.Features solving problems

The task in front of you someone puts it some kind of difficulty, which you have to cope. Most often, psychologists say that the problem - it is a goal that must be achieved in conditions that limit the ways to achieve it. If the goal can be reached at once, it is not the problem. Go to the kitchen and pour a glass of water - it's not the problem. If there are some formidable obstacles, such as social (in the kitchen sitting parents who do not want you to start), then such a situation and attract the interest of psychologists between you and the kitchen. The problem is most often local, well defined, with a more or less clear purpose, and in the decisions you need to find some ways, the means to get to that goal.

In human culture, there are many areas that cultivate the problem as a special stratum of experience. As an example, methodological support school mathematics. This is a great example of how people built a certain complexity of the problem in a given material, then to replicate and teach them to solve. The complexity of the most trivial problems can cheat in different directions. The problem is trivial, but extremely difficult to deal with, if she has a lot of additional built.

• 2.The task of thinking as a subject of study

Tasks - this is the main subject of psychological study of thinking. Thinking - the internal process. As he starts and stops, it even stops - is unclear. For a few hundred years of observations, and then study the people came up to activate only one way of thinking - to offer some difficulty, to put the person in a problematic situation. The task - is one of the options of the problem situation. By varying the properties of the task - and they are extremely diverse in material, structure and strategies that are needed to solve - you get the opportunity to explore different "slices" of thinking.
By selecting the task in a special way, you can in different ways to target the human mind, put it in a different problem situations and learn it from different sides. Among other things, the problem is very useful as educational material. In this sense, quite knowingly secondary school of the European type is based on the solution of problems. When teachers say they teach children to think, it means that they teach them to solve problems - often typical.

• 3.Peculiarities ofsolving problems

About 40 years ago, psychologists began to pay attention to the fact that there is another type of difficulty, which eventually was called "problem." Problems are arranged completely as the problem. Firstly, before a man can not put a problem, a person enters into the problem state itself. This process is called "problematization". However, even if you do nothing, the problem itself you will find. In this sense, the problem of living by its laws. Even if you do nothing, it does not mean that you will not have problems.

Secondly, the problem of poorly formulated. Problems often have a ready formulation, or even a person who knows how it is properly formulated and solved. Problems are arranged differently: they are not known or very poorly defined goal to be achieved, and because they are much more difficult to solve. If you are going to have serious difficulty in life, it is absolutely not the fact that you know where you need to move on. That is why a variety of procedures invented to solve problems, make you the first step to decide: where you go, what you want, what the goal is in front of you. It is also clear that the correct solution to the problem in general can no one know.

• 4.Problem field

In addition, the issue includes a variety of elements of reality and thinking. For example, how can a set of concepts to describe the challenges in environmental protection? For example, people, money, upsetting the balance between man and nature, waste (what to do with them - is unclear), the political struggle, a terrible future and so on. Such a material from which the problem is called "problematic field". From it develops the difficulty with which a person or group of people to work.
Very famous explorer address D. Doerner wrote: "Imagine that you are playing a game of chess, but special. When you make a move, then, as all the pieces are connected, you move around the board all the pieces at once. " This is a problem when every move changes the position of all the pieces. This situation Doerner calls "the principle of a spring mattress": when you click on a spring mattress in one place, all its parts are moved.

• 5.The decision of intellectual problems

The longest process that is able to study the psychologists - is a process of solving problems. There are scientific problems that were solved for decades, and with a non-guaranteed outcome. This does not mean that a person every 15 minutes with her fighting, but he returned to the problem many times, published works, discussed it. Mendeleev, for example, come up with a table for more than 10 years; After Einstein general theory of relativity 20 years trying to build a more general theory. All these processes take a great amount of time. The correct answer, as well as the correct direction of his quest, because no one knows. Interviewed Nobel laureates said that more than half the time spent on the decision it took on the formulation of the problem.

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When psychologists have realized that the problems are different from the tasks they have to seriously discuss whether you can do the means and forms of thinking, which are suitable for the tasks to cope with problems. Apparently, no. "Problem" thinking differently arranged. About him not much is known, although, of course, there are people who solve the problem brilliantly. At the moment, the process of solving problems is still calling the psychology of thinking.