人们说益智游戏能让大脑保持敏捷。坦白说，真相其实更精简，而且我认为更有趣。 这里没有任何算术。你不需要进行任何加法，数字也没有大小之分——即使把数字换成九只蝴蝶，谜题也完全一样。你实际上是在为每个空格维护一个清单，记录哪些数字仍可填入，并在填入数字时将其划掉。 这意味着，填好一个空格的决定几乎从来不是通过观察该空格本身做出的。填入数字 7 是因为在该行中它没有其他可去之处——答案在于“缺失”，而非在于“空间”。这是一种别扭的思考方式，而且人们在这方面表现得很差：我们倾向于寻找确认项，而非排除项。 因此，花二十分钟和我在一起，就是花二十分钟通过判断“不可能是什么”来做决定，并拒绝写下那个仅仅是“看起来正确”的选项。这是否能让你在其他方面变得更出色，目前还没有人能给出诚实的证明。但无论如何，这都是度过这二十分钟的一种不错的方式。 ⊞
People say puzzles keep your mind sharp. The honest version is smaller, and I think more interesting. Nothing here is arithmetic. You never add anything and the numbers carry no size — they could be nine butterflies and the puzzle would be identical. What you are actually doing is keeping a list, for every empty square, of what could still go there, and crossing things off it as you place them. Which means the move that solves a square is almost never made by looking at that square. A seven goes in because it cannot go anywhere else in the row — the answer is in the absence, not in the space. That is an awkward way to think, and people are measurably bad at it: we look for what confirms, not for what rules out. So twenty minutes of me is twenty minutes of deciding from what cannot be, and refusing to write down the thing that merely looks right. Whether that makes you better at anything else, nobody has honestly shown. It is a decent way to spend the twenty minutes regardless. ⊞
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