Cooking for Geeks
by Jeff Potter · 2 Aug 2010 · 728pp · 182,850 words
matches, and a box of nails, and asked to mount the candle on a wall. Without burning down the house, how would you do it? Functional Fixedness The problem just described is called Duncker’s Candle Problem, after Karl Duncker, who studied the cognitive biases that we bring to problems. In this
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or heaver than the others, and the balance scale will magically break after exactly three uses. Problems like these almost invariably come down to breaking functional fixedness and overcoming confirmation bias (here, in the sense of being blinded to new uses by knowing previous uses). The obvious solutions to the candle problem
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a shelf. (I’m dreading all the emails I’m going to get with photos of this being done in other ways.) Approaches for overcoming functional fixedness in puzzles, code, or the kitchen are the same. Understand what you actually have and what you’re asked to do, break it down into
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. That’s it. Eat anything you want—just as long as you’re willing to cook it yourself." Tips for Newbies Knowing how to overcome functional fixedness problems such as Duncker’s Candle Problem requires understanding how to read a recipe and break it down into the individual steps, so that you
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few minutes. Next time you’re in the kitchen, open the fridge door and scrounge around for leftovers, doing your best to see past the functional fixedness that we talked about earlier. If you do find that cooking for one ends up being too expensive or time consuming, consider finding a cooking
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’t by any means a complete list. Rather, this should be enough to get you started thinking outside the box (or, harking back to the functional fixedness concept discussed in the opening chapter, getting to see the box in a different way). 3D Printing and Mold Making Many aspects of "playing with
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: Cooking’s Primary Variables temperatures of common, Cooked = Time * Temperature chemical taxonomies, Analytical Method chemicals in foods (see ) chemoreceptors, Taste (Gustatory Sense) Chex Mix experiment, Functional Fixedness Chez Panisse, Whipped Cream Chicken, Broiled and Roasted, 310°F / 154°C: Maillard Reactions Become Noticeable Child, Julia appeal of, Don’t be afraid to
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, Commercial Hardware and Techniques vacuum packers, Water heaters vacuum sealers, Chocolate water heaters, Water heaters competitive (cooking style), Functional Fixedness, Know your type conduction (heat transfer), Methods of Heat Transfer, Sous Vide Cooking confirmational bias, Functional Fixedness Congee, Rice, Rice, Wheat, Grains ≅ Congee, Cream of Wheat, Porridge consommé, Filtration, Stock, broth, and consommé contaminants
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, Taste == Feedback, Reading Between the Lines matching food properties with methods, Heat Transfer and Doneness most important variable in, Cooked = Time * Temperature reasons for, Functional Fixedness stages in, Functional Fixedness, Have fun! stirring food while, Reading Between the Lines tasting food during, Tips for Newbies Cooking Issues blog, Commercial Hardware and Techniques, Stock, broth
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, and consommé cooking styles conflict and, Functional Fixedness self-test, Know your type Wansink on, Functional Fixedness Cooking: A Quintessential Art (This), Sugar Cook’s Illustrated, Prepping Ingredients, Kitchen Pruning copper bowls, Analytical Method, Egg Whites coq au
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Confit, 154°F / 68°C: Collagen (Type I) Denatures Duck Confit Sugo, Reading Between the Lines Dufresne, Wylie, Modern Industrial Chemicals Duncker, Karl, Functional Fixedness Duncker’s Candle Problem, Functional Fixedness DuPont, Salty Dwight, John, Playing with Chemicals E E numbers classification, E Numbers: The Dewey Decimal System of Food Additives E. coli, Cutting
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, How to Prevent Foodborne Illness Caused by Parasites Early French Cookery (Scully), Regional/Traditional Method Eat Tweet (Evans), Reading Between the Lines eating habits changing, Functional Fixedness physiological reasons, A Few Words on Nutrition Edman, Lenore, Making ice cream egg whites about, 144°F / 62°C: Eggs Begin to Set as mechanical
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tips, Breakfast sous vide cooking, Sous Vide Cooking F Fake, Caterina, Seasonal Method Famous Old Receipts (Smith), Reading Between the Lines Fancy Fast Food website, Functional Fixedness farmers’ markets, Seasonal Method FAT TOM acronym, Foodborne Illness and Staying Safe, Acids and Bases, Anti-Sugar: Lactisole fat washing, Alcohol fats capsaicin and, Combinations
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for Common Allergies temperatures for doneness, 104°F / 40°C and 122°F / 50°C: Proteins in Fish and Meat Begin to Denature fixed function, Functional Fixedness flash pickling, Chocolate flavor combinations, Choosing Your Inputs: Flavors and Ingredients adapt and experiment method, Choosing Your Inputs: Flavors and Ingredients, Adapt and Experiment Method
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Equipment Strawberry or Raspberry Soufflé, Egg Yolks syrup experiment, Sugar Watermelon and Feta Cheese Salad, Combinations of Tastes and Smells frying pans, Pots and pans functional fixedness, Functional Fixedness, Tips for Newbies fungiform papillae, Salty furaneol, Smell (Olfactory Sense) fusion cooking, Rice, Wheat, Grains ≅ Congee, Cream of Wheat, Porridge G Gagnaire, Pierre, Sugar Garcia
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and Ingredients Gin and Tonic, Stock, broth, and consommé Ginger Lemon Soda, Yeast in beverages Ginger Syrup, Sweet Gingerbread Cookies, Baking Soda giving (cooking style), Functional Fixedness, Know your type gliadin, Air: Baking’s Key Variable, Gluten glutamate (amino acid), Smell + Taste = Flavor, Sweet, Umami (a.k.a. Savory) glutamine, Gluten, Meat
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Illness Caused by Bacteria hacker thinking defined, Think Like a Hacker Duncker’s Candle Problem, Functional Fixedness functional fixedness and, Functional Fixedness, Tips for Newbies in kitchen, Think Like a Hacker learning how to cook and, Tips for Newbies mental restructuring, Functional Fixedness hands as kitchen tool, Unitaskers as thermometers, Thermometers and timers hazelnuts, Taste (Gustatory Sense) healthy
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(cooking style), Functional Fixedness, Know your type heat gradient, Heat Transfer and Doneness heat shields, Convection heat transfer carryover and
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and scales related, Adapt and Experiment Method sifting dry, Chemical Leaveners using unfamiliar, Reading Between the Lines weighing, Measuring cups and scales innovative (cooking style), Functional Fixedness, Know your type inputs to cooking, Choosing Your Inputs: Flavors and Ingredients (see also ; ) environmentally sound, Seasonal Method in cooking diagram
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, Functional Fixedness instant yeast, Yeast in beverages interfacial tension, Making Foams: Lecithin intermolecular bonds, Alcohol International Cooking Concepts, Filtration iota carrageenan, Making Gels: Starches, Carrageenan, Agar, and
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for One meringues, Meringues French Meringue, Meringues Lemon Meringue Pie, Making gels: Starches Meringue Cookies, Meringues Savory French Meringues, Anti-Sugar: Lactisole methodical (cooking style), Functional Fixedness, Know your type methylcellulose, Making Things Melt in Weird Ways: Methylcellulose and Maltodextrin metmyoglobin, How to Prevent Foodborne Illness Caused by Bacteria metric, converting to
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, Taste == Feedback, Picking a Recipe Metro Cart, Counter Layout milling flour, Gluten mindful eating, Functional Fixedness Mindless Eating (Wansink), Functional Fixedness miracle berries, Combinations of Tastes and Smells miraculin, Combinations of Tastes and Smells mise en place technique, Calibrating Your Instruments, Thermometers and timers Miso
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to Prevent Foodborne Illness Caused by Bacteria NSRDEC, Mozzarella spheres nut allergies, Ingredients to avoid nutrition, general rules, A Few Words on Nutrition nutritional gatekeepers, Functional Fixedness O Oaxacan Drinking Chocolate, Avoid PEBKAC-type errors: RTFR! odorants artificial, Smell (Olfactory Sense), Analytical Method defined, Taste (Gustatory Sense) oil bacteria and, Foodborne Illness
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jam, Baking Powder starchy vegetables and, 158°F / 70°C: Vegetable Starches Break Down pepper grinders, Unitaskers pepperminty odor, Analytical Method perceptions, reasons for cooking, Functional Fixedness Perfumer’s Compendium (Allured), Analytical Method perishable foods, storage tips, Kitchen Equipment PFOA, Pots and pans pH scale about, Baking Soda, Acids and Bases food
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and Ingredients, Seasonal Method sedimentation, Yeast in beverages Seitan, Gluten Sennett, Richard, 356°F / 180°C: Sugar Begins to Caramelize Visibly sensations, reasons for cooking, Functional Fixedness serving bowls, food as, Sous Vide Cooking sharpening knives, Knives shear thinning, Making Gels: Starches, Carrageenan, Agar, and Sodium Alginate Short Ribs, Slow-Cooked, 154
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, Pots and pans volume versus weight, Spoons & co. W Waffles, Yeast, Yeast in breads Walshin, Lydia, Know your type, Reading Between the Lines Wansink, Brian, Functional Fixedness water as polar bond, Alcohol gluten formation and, Gluten heat transfer rate, Convection maltodextrin and, "Melts" in your mouth: Maltodextrin mixing with oil, Making Foams
The Eureka Factor
by John Kounios · 14 Apr 2015 · 262pp · 80,257 words
, after years of experience thinking about pliers as having one particular function, it’s difficult to think of them as having a different function. This “functional fixedness” is similar to the difficulty of the Nine-Dot Problem: People assume that there are rules, boundaries, or restrictions where there aren’t any. It
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experienced when they couldn’t think of fire as anything other than a threat to be eliminated or avoided. Only Dodge was able to overcome functional fixedness and realize that fire was also a tool that would enable him to solve the problem and save his life. In such cases, the trick
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is to be open to alternative, nonobvious interpretations. This is how he broke out of his box. Functional fixedness imprisons thought just when it needs to be liberated. And, worse, it doesn’t take a lifetime of experience with fire or tools for this
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or my telephone to pound in that nail? Could the oven dry my clothes just as well as that clothes dryer? On a daily basis, functional fixedness is a relief, not a curse. That’s why you shouldn’t even attempt to consider all your options and possibilities. You can’t. If
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the thumbtacks were loose rather than in a container. FIGURE 12.1: The Candle Problem. When the tacks are presented in the box, this induces “functional fixedness”—it’s hard to think of the box as anything other than a container. That’s why, as we’ve seen, solving the problem usually
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’t bother with the idea of fastening the rings together with melted candlewax. The rings are heavy, and the wax won’t hold them together. Functional fixedness is the impediment to realizing the solution: In this case, it’s difficult to overcome the tendency to think of creating light as the sole
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wick so that you can use the wick as a string to tie the rings together. This neutral-description technique enabled participants to solve more functional fixedness problems than other people who were just told to solve the problems without being given any special instructions. Clearly it’s possible to improve a
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can solve some types of problems more quickly and accurately than older children is described in T. P. German and M. A. Defeyter, “Immunity to Functional Fixedness in Young Children,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 7 (2000): 707–12. The diagram of the brain shown in figure 3.9 is reproduced from commons
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of the effects of financial incentives on performance in solving the Candle Problem is described in S. Glucksberg, “The Influence of Strength of Drive on Functional Fixedness and Perceptual Recognition,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 63 (1962): 36–41. Figure 12.1 is taken from upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/Genimage
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. 2 Tony McCaffrey’s insight training procedure is described in T. McCaffrey, “Innovation Relies on the Obscure: A Key to Overcoming the Classic Problem of Functional Fixedness,” Psychological Science 23 (2012): 215–18. 3 For a study of insight training that shows generalization to other types of problems, see J. E. Davidson
Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life
by Ozan Varol · 13 Apr 2020 · 389pp · 112,319 words
outcome. A barometer is supposed to measure pressure, not serve as a makeshift weight for a rope. The barometer story is a good example of functional fixedness. As psychologist Karl Duncker explains, the concept refers to a “mental block against using an object in a new way that is required to solve
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eyes kept darting to the familiar solution on the chess board, our minds fixate on the function we know. Perhaps the most famous example of functional fixedness is the candle problem, designed by Duncker. He devised an experiment where he seated participants at a table adjacent to a wall and gave them
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matches, and the thumbtacks—were placed in three boxes. The first group saw boxes being used as containers and, as a result, suffered from acute functional fixedness. They had a much harder time using the box for anything other than storing objects. But for the second group, the objects were sitting on
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candle. The results were similar to the conclusion of the study involving chess experts. In both cases, performance improved when the familiar solution was removed. Functional fixedness arises from a set of assumptions we have about what a box or a barometer is supposed to do. We can reduce
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functional fixedness by taking out Occam’s razor—which we explored earlier in the book—and cutting our assumptions about the tool. If you didn’t know
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. In one study, participants were divided into two groups and asked to solve eight insight problems—including the candle problem—that required them to overcome functional fixedness.40 The control group received no training. The other group was taught to use function-free descriptions of objects—for example, instead of saying “a
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: HarperCollins College Publishers, 1995), and can be found at https://kaushikghose.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/angels-on-a-pin.pdf. 37. Robert E. Adamson, “Functional Fixedness as Related to Problem Solving: A Repetition of Three Experiments,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 44, no. 4 (October 1952): 288–291, www.dtic.mil/dtic
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1, 2004, www.inta.org/INTABulletin/Pages/VELCRO.aspx. 40. Tony McCaffrey, “Innovation Relies on the Obscure: A Key to Overcoming the Classic Problem of Functional Fixedness,” Psychological Science 23, no. 3 (February 7, 2012): 215–218, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797611429580. 41. Ron Miller, “How AWS Came
The Achievement Habit: Stop Wishing, Start Doing, and Take Command of Your Life
by Bernard Roth · 6 Jul 2015 · 231pp · 73,818 words
device using a box of Cheerios, a hammer, tape, cotton balls, a hairbrush, and a bag of marbles. Most people have a cognitive bias called functional fixedness that causes them to see objects only in their normal context. The use of the materials and tools in their ordinary way will generally lead
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to no workable solutions or, at the very most, mundane ones. The really exciting solutions come from overcoming functional fixedness and using these everyday items in new ways. To see the possibilities it is helpful to take the viewpoint that nothing is what you think
Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes
by Maria Konnikova · 3 Jan 2013 · 317pp · 97,824 words
situation do not see that something obvious—a box of tacks—might actually be something less obvious: a box and tacks. This is known as functional fixedness. We tend to see objects the way they are presented, as serving a specific function that is already assigned. The box and tacks go together
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, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 filtering, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 foreign language learning, ref1 Fosbury, Dick, ref1 Frederick, Shane, ref1 frontal cortex, ref1 functional fixedness, ref1 Gardner, Edward, ref1 Gazzaniga, Michael, ref1 Gilbert, Daniel, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Gillette, William, ref1 Gollwitzer, Peter, ref1 Great Wyrley, Staffordshire, England, ref1, ref2
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
by Daniel H. Pink · 1 Jan 2008 · 204pp · 54,395 words
ten minutes, most people stumble onto the solution, which you can see below. The candle problem solved. The key is to overcome what's called functional fixedness. You look at the box and see only one function as a container for the tacks. But by thinking afresh, you eventually see that the
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? New York Times , November 20, 2008. LSE: When Performance-Related Pay Backfires, Financial , June 25, 2009. Sam Glucksberg, The Influence of Strength of Drive on Functional Fixedness and Perceptual Recognition, Journal of Experimental Psychology 63 (1962): 36-41. Glucksberg obtained similar results in his Problem Solving: Response Competition Under the Influence of
More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded)
by Michael J. Mauboussin · 1 Jan 2006 · 348pp · 83,490 words
leads to deteriorating expert performance as problems go from the simple to the complex. Two concepts are useful here. The first is what psychologists call functional fixedness, the idea that when we use or think about something in a particular way we have great difficulty in thinking about it in new ways
The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
by Steven Pinker · 1 Jan 2014 · 477pp · 106,069 words
of what it looks like and what it is made of. This transition, another staple of the cognitive psychology curriculum, is called functional fixity (sometimes functional fixedness).24 In the textbook experiment, people are given a candle, a book of matches, and a box of thumbtacks, and are asked to attach the
Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges and Leaderboards
by Yu-Kai Chou · 13 Apr 2015 · 420pp · 130,503 words
Problem”. http://icreate-project.eu/index.php?t=245↩ Sam Glucksberg. Journal of Experimental Psychology 63. P36-41.“The Influence of Strength of Drive on Functional Fixedness and Perceptual Recognition”. 1962.↩ Creativity Development and Innovation for SMEs“Exercise 6: The Candle Problem”. http://icreate-project.eu/index.php?t=245↩ Creativity Development
Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet?
by Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland · 15 Jan 2021 · 342pp · 72,927 words
-Laird. 1993. Focussing in reasoning and decision making. Cognition 49(1–2), 37–66. 5 It originates from an immovable state of mind known as functional fixedness. See K. Duncker and L. S. Lees. 1945. On problem-solving. Psychological Monographs 58(5), i–113. 6 H. R. McMaster. 2020. Battlegrounds: The Fight
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