Page 238 - Mind Games The Aging Brain and How to Keep it Healthy

222 • Chapter 7

and predict the next item in a pattern. This is called inductive
reasoning. To a large extent, inductive reasoning is a learned
skill. For the most difficult problems, however, insight and
creativity are needed—two qualities that are considered to
be possessed by very intelligent people. On the Mental Abil-
ity Pretest, the questions that ask for the next item in a se-
quence are inductive-reasoning problems.
@ A large portion of inductive-reasoning problems involves
numbers, and a word of caution is required here. It is not un-
common for people to slide over numbers while they are read-
ing. Numbers are not perceived to be important for some
people. In fact, they think the numbers are superfluous, inter-
rupt their reading, and get in the way of the meaning of the
sentences. If you consider yourself a number skipper, you
might think about developing a facility for observing and in-
corporating numbers into the text you read. Some people are
fond of saying, “Oh, I’ve never been very good at math.” Well,
here is your chance to get good at math. There is a saying in
mathematics that “a mathematician is a pattern seeker.” The
following section will help you develop pattern-seeking skills.
You can employ several strategies to determine a nu-
merical pattern from a sequence of numbers. The place to
start is identifying the pattern. In the following sequence,
you can predict the next number:
1,2,3,4,5,6, . . .
The next number is, of course, 7. You knew that. What
you may not realize is that you recognized the pattern as the
counting numbers and retrieved the seven from long-term
memory. There are so many connections to this pattern of
numbers that you probably were not aware of the recall
mechanism at work! This process of immediate recall is
quite different from problem solving. In problem solving,
you do not have the answer already stored in memory. You
must identify the question, note all of the facts you already
have, and then determine what is missing. After you
figure out what is missing, the creative work begins. We will
apply this sequence of steps to a few inductive-reasoning
numerical problems.