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Creative Insight: The Redistribution Theory 89

of paper, cutting something with a pair of scissors, tying a knot, multiplying
a number by a small integer and so on. Some insight problems require no
physical actions at all, merely an inference or two. The difficulty lies solely in
thinking of the right action or inference. (c) The problems are difficult in the
sense that the time required by adults of average intelligence to think of the
solution is out of proportion to the time it takes to execute the solution, once
thought of.
For example, the Two-String Problem poses the task of tying together
two ropes hanging from the ceiling at such a distance that a person cannot
reach the second rope while holding on to the first. The solution is to tie
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some heavy object to the second rope and set it swinging, walk back to the
first rope and grab it, and grab the second rope at the end of its swing. The
Hat-Rack Problem requires the problem solver to build a hat rack out of three
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2-by-4 wooden boards and a C-clamp. The solution is to wedge two boards
between floor and ceiling, keep them in place with the clamp and hang the hat
on the clamp handle. Other problems are more geometrical than practical.
For example, the Nine Dot Problem poses the task of drawing four straight
lines through nine dots, arranged in a square, without lifting the pen and
without retracing. Yet others are verbal riddles. The b.c. Coin Problem is an
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example: A man enters a rare coin shop proposing to sell what appears to be a
Roman coin with an emperor’s head on one side and the text “150 b.c.” on the
other. The store owner immediately phones the police. Why? It usually takes
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a couple of minutes before a college student spots the anomaly that a coin
maker could not have known himself to be living in the year 150 b.c. (Before
Christ). Yet others are numerical puzzles. In the Lily Pond Problem, the ques-
tion is this: If the lilies on a pond cover 1.6% of the pond surface and grow so
fast that they double the area they cover every 24 hours, and the pond surface is
1.2 acres, how much of the surface of the pond do they cover the day before they
cover the whole pond? 8
Researchers have inherited a list of such problems, designated as insight
problems by previous generations of researchers. To some critics of insight
research, the relevance of the results obtained by observing people solve such
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artificial tasks and puzzles is questionable. But the distinction between arti-
ficial and natural tasks does not survive scrutiny. Human beings engage in
an infinite variety of activities and practices, few of which are natural in any
deep sense. If artificial means socially constructed or invented, then the set of
artificial tasks includes chess, computer programming, mathematics, paint-
ing, scientific discovery, technological invention and most other tasks com-
monly seen to require creativity, so cognitive research on all those tasks would