The Little Book of Genius E-Book

Dr Keith Souter

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

At any party, there's always one person who stands out from the crowd, because he or she talks more intelligently and tells better jokes than everyone else there. And everyone else wishes they were as knowledgeable and witty as that person. Thanks to Keith Souter's The Little Book of Genius, they can be, or at least appear to be. The first part, which is based on serious scientific foundations explained in an accessible and light-hearted manner, explains some handy techniques for winning an argument, getting your point across, telling a joke and generally making the most of yourself. The second contains the essentials of what you need to know about literature, history, art, music, science, sport and other subjects, so that people will think you are cultured, intelligent and well-read. With the help of The Little Book of Genius, you can be the envy of everyone else at the party!

Leseprobe

For Nik, one of my oldest friends, who first introduced me to the concept of heuristics

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part 1: The Seeds of Genius

1. You Don’t Have to be a Genius

2. Heuristics and Rules of Thumb

3. A Matter of Character

4. Creativity

5. The Lost Art of Sophistry

6. Improve Your Memory

7. Comic Genius (Or How to Tell a Joke)

Part 2: Omni-Science

8. Science

9. Mathematics

10. History

11. Literature

12. Drama

13. Poetry

14. Art

15. Philosophy

16. Medicine and the Body

17. Religion and Belief

18. Economics and Finance

19. Sport

20. A Little Latin

21. Cooking or Cuisine

Afterword

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book began in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence. Not the actual writing, you understand, simply the idea. I was there to see the statue of David by Michelangelo. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get as close as I wanted, because there was a large chap lying on his back with a cushion under his head. He was staring up at the statue and nodding his head.

‘You need to view him from the ground,’ he explained as he rose to his feet. ‘Look, the head and the hands are out of proportion. Michelangelo meant for it to be mounted on the cathedral roofline. If you look up you will see how he meant it to be seen.’

I was impressed. That little snippet of information dropped into conversation would make one sound really knowledgeable about sculpture. From that simple idea the book developed.

And now it is done, I would like to thank some special people. First of all, I thank Dr Nik Chmiel for our many long and interesting discussions about all sorts of things when we were students.

I am grateful to Isabel Atherton, my wonderful agent at Creative Authors, whose advice on the manuscript was of great help.

Thanks to Simon Hamlet who was the Senior Commissioning Editor at The History Press and who accepted the book and started it on its road.

A huge thank you to Fiona McDonald, my talented artist and friend, who skilfully interpreted my text to make the book such a visually appealing work.

And finally, many thanks to my editor, Abbie Wood, for polishing the book, and to Lindsey Smith for help with the wonderful cover.

It has been a pleasure to work with you all.

INTRODUCTION

It is a fact that few people can truly claim to be called genius. The thing is that you don’t have to be a genius to get by. There is nothing wrong in being one of the crowd, but, equally, there is nothing wrong in wanting to stand out – to shine.

If you pass a degree then you are assumed to have a significant knowledge about a subject. Yet you may have only scraped through with 50 per cent of the knowledge required to pass the syllabus for that degree. And that is a selected syllabus, rather than the whole subject. Then if you take a higher degree, that does not mean that you study more and more about the subject. Usually it means that you study more about a smaller area. Thus, an expert is actually someone who knows a great deal about less and less. If you get him or her off that small area then you may seem to be just as expert, because it is easy to get yourself up to the level of ‘less.’ If you do it with good humour then you will be seen as a pleasant dilettante, and that is a good reputation to have.

The premise that I am using in this book is that ‘less is more.’ That may seem trite, but in fact you can use heuristics, or rules of thumb, to appear very knowledgeable through a whole range of subjects and topics. And the nature of heuristics is that you can do this very quickly, with just basic knowledge.

Do you remember people at school, college or university who seemed to goof around, yet who always did well at exams? They may even have been a source of irritation to others who had covered the whole subject and spent far longer in studying it. It may have seemed unfair that they were so successful with so little effort. Well, they were probably lucky to an extent, but they also probably used heuristics, or rules of thumb, to get quick results.

At parties or meetings, have you ever felt as if you are part of the furniture, unable to contribute because you know nothing about the topic of conversation? There are others who you know will have even less knowledge, yet they can hold forth and hold their own. You can learn to do that and you can be the one whose knowledge people admire.

This book will show you how.

PART 1

THE SEEDS OF GENIUS

1

YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE A GENIUS

Genius is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration.

Thomas Alva Edison

Inventor and genius

It must be pretty amazing being a genius, don’t you think? To be able to develop an idea that is so mind-bogglingly clever that you alter the very way that people think. The French philosopher, mathematician and physicist René Descartes did just that in 1637 when he wrote ‘cogito ergo sum,’ meaning ‘I think, therefore I am.’ In that simple aphorism, which tells you that you prove your existence merely by the act of thinking about it, he literally raised the consciousness of western civilisation. Accordingly, he was rightly hailed as the ‘Father of Modern Philosophy.’

Leonardo da Vinci

And how marvellous it must be to unravel the nature of the mysterious force of gravity, or reveal the way that the solar system works, and then invent a whole new branch of mathematics in order to have the tools to delve where no mind had delved before. Sir Isaac Newton did all that and much more in the closing years of the seventeenth century.

Living and working in Italy during the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci was hundreds of years ahead of his time in too many areas to cover. He was the greatest representational artist of all time, an inventor, anatomist and engineer, and he pushed back the frontiers in all of those areas.

William Shakespeare, England’s great Tudor playwright, left us plays that make us laugh, weep, think and wonder. The characters that he created are wonderfully formed psychological studies of emotions which are equal to anything that was written by Freud, Jung or Adler almost 400 years later.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a virtuoso on the keyboard and violin, and was able to compose music at the age of 5. When he died at the tragically young age of 36 he had written over 600 pieces of music and enriched the world.

Charles Darwin, the great English naturalist, wrote On the Origin of Species in 1859. Undoubtedly this is one of the most influential scientific books of all time, outlining his theory that all species of life on Earth have descended from common ancestors, in a branching, evolving manner that he called ‘natural selection.’

Thomas Alva Edison was the most prolific inventor in history, holding well over 1,000 patents on various inventions. And what inventions they were: things like the light bulb, the phonograph and the film projector.

And, of course, Albert Einstein, that epitome of genius, gave us the special and general theories of relativity which have transformed the world of physics, our whole view of reality and the nature of the universe and time.

All of these great men deserve to be called genius, although by his own admission Thomas Edison felt that much of his genius was down to sheer hard work. And this rather begs the question, ‘what is a genius?’ It is a question that we must look at quickly, if only to get it out of the way.

SO WHAT IS A GENIUS?

This is a word that is bandied about a lot these days. That is understandable, since our modern world is dominated by celebrity culture. The use of superlatives has become second nature to people. We describe qualities or inadequacies as being hyper- or ultra-, to emphasise that they are well beyond the norm, even when they patently are not. Some people, who were at one time proclaimed to be stars in their particular walk of life, would nowadays be referred to as super-stars or even mega-stars. Similarly, people who would once have been called ‘talented’ after making some modest contribution to art or knowledge will these days be accorded the title of ‘genius.’

This is a step too far, in my opinion. A genius is a unique character. To be a genius requires far more than merely being intelligent, or attaining a certain rating in an intelligence test. It is having the ability not merely to push back frontiers, but to create new ones that no one else believed to be possible. It is the ability to conceptualise the previously inconceivable and express it in terms comprehensible to lesser brains.

On that basis, I think I would have reservations about including Edison in the select little group that I started with, and would place him in the lower realm of ordinary mortals, where most of us belong. That is not to lessen his gargantuan achievements, for he undoubtedly belongs within the upper echelons of the intelligentsia, along with your common-or-garden Nobel Prize-winner. And what is wrong with that? It is still a level to which most of us can only aspire.

Yet being a genius probably makes life difficult. How do you get a partner, for one thing? If you are brighter than everyone else around it must make for a pretty lonely existence. Of course, this presupposes that a genius is a genius in all areas of their life or in everything that they think. There is actually no reason to suppose that to be the case.

William Shakespeare may have been a dab hand at writing plays, but could he play the ukulele? Similarly, could Mozart work out the reason for the anatomy of a sea-whelk or the behaviour of a barnacle? We know that Isaac Newton could be preoccupied to the point of rudeness, forgetting that he had dinner guests, or that he had even had dinner on occasions. There is possibly a price to pay for genius.

I am being slightly facetious here. While one can laud genius, admire it and strive hard to understand it, if you were handed it on a plate, would you really want it? I suspect you would, but remember, gentle reader, the downside. There is the weight of expectation. You have to use that genius. You have to show that you are able to fathom the unfathomable; you must be brave enough to visit realms unthought of, to pose a question then answer it in a highly creative manner that is beyond that of your fellows. You risk ridicule, envy and, worse, self-loathing if you under-achieve what only you are capable of believing to be possible.

BUT YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE A GENIUS

The chances are that you are not a genius! OK, I’ve said it. You have read it and you can either gnash your teeth, throw the book into a corner, or accept it and get on with life.

Once again, there is a serious point here. Just imagine that you are sitting round a dinner table with one or other of these geniuses, or are having a drink with a group of them in the pub: would they fill the air with words, would their wit scintillate you and would their contributions to the discussion leave everyone in their wake?

We do not know, of course, but just because they exhibited genius in one area does not mean that they did so in all that they ever thought or did. A genius out of his or her particular environment might be nothing but a dullard and a bore.

On the other hand, there may be others at the table or standing by the bar who positively glitter, and they may have no actual genius for anything. Yet at that particular gathering they may appear to be the genius in your midst.

Now, if you already are that type of person who everyone listens to, then this book will have little appeal. However, if you are a genuine genius, but, despite your genius, you sometimes come across as a dullard or a bore, then maybe you will reap the rewards that may be gained by reading the whole lot. And if you are one of the crowd who would just like to be listened to, then read on.

DO YOU WANT TO SHINE?

This is really the crux of the matter. If you are the sort of person who hovers in the background and hopes that no one is going to ask for your opinion, then this book is for you. You may not be as confident as the chap who will expound on anything, even if you are just as bright as or more intelligent than him. Some people even find themselves agreeing with others when they actually totally disagree, so dented is their confidence to stand up for their own point of view. If that describes you, then read on. There may be help for you in this book.

Does it gall you when you seem to get beaten in arguments all the time, when no one listens to your point of view, or when your point of view is ruthlessly swept aside? Why is that, you may ask? Is it because you are ignorant of a subject? Do you simply not have the confidence to stand your ground? On the other hand, could it be that you actually are less able than those around you?

Don’t even go there. You can be the person that people listen to. It can be your argument that wins the day. And it can be your knowledge that people admire. The simple truth is that you don’t have to be a reservoir of information. You can get by with heuristic knowledge. You can win arguments by practising the art of sophistry. And you can use various techniques to shine and impress people in all sorts of social and professional situations.

They may even think that, in a way, you are a bit of a genius.

That is what this book is about. And that is what I am going to show you.

FIRST OF ALL FORGET ALL THAT IQ NONSENSE

That’s right – forget it!

People may hold their hands up in horror at this suggestion, but don’t worry about them. They are either psychologists who have a vested interest in setting IQ tests or people who have high IQs and believe that this makes them more intelligent than other people. That is nonsense. All that an IQ demonstrates is an aptitude to do IQ tests.

What a ridiculous thing an IQ score is. It is a bit like having a golf handicap, only in reverse. A good golfer is someone with a low handicap; a good IQ puzzle-solver has a high IQ. A low golf handicap shows that you have an aptitude for knocking a golf ball around a field in fewer shots than other folk, but it doesn’t indicate that you are especially good at anything else. True, in golf clubs you will go to the top of the pecking order, you will belong to that part of the membership who describe themselves as ‘tigers,’ whereas the poor golfer possessed of a high handicap will have to play with others of his ilk, and be derided as a ‘rabbit’ by the tiger group.

The same thing goes for the IQ brigade. They love knowing that they have higher IQ scores than the riff-raff. To them, that score officially means that they are members of the intelligentsia, the cognoscenti, the boffins’ club. The higher the score the more are they apt to think that they have or are not far short of genius.

Well, stuff and nonsense. Don’t for a minute allow yourself to be brow-beaten by a high scoring IQ puzzle-solver. Don’t imagine that their score means anything in the real world.

No, none of it matters. Your own IQ is a total irrelevance. What we are talking about here in this book is how to make the best of yourself to win arguments, get your point across, make good decisions and appear to know what you are talking about. Generally, to be more confident in life.

And you can learn to do all this by understanding a bit about how the mind works, developing strategies to apply and use in arguments, and how to use basic knowledge to hold your own in any discussion. If you understand heuristics, or rules of thumb, which I shall come to later in the book, then you will appreciate the concept that ‘less is more.’

Confidence may be one of the issues that you have, especially in social settings. Your confidence can be built up if you equip yourself with techniques to ‘shine.’ And here is how we are going to do it.

YOU CAN LOSE AN ARGUMENT BEFORE YOU OPEN YOUR MOUTH

That is perfectly true. You may expect to lose and may even tend to avoid arguments and discussions because of your poor history in arguments or debates. Yet you may watch politicians in the news or on TV panel programmes spout utter nonsense, only to give a counter-argument on a later occasion or after there has been a change in party policy. You may form the opinion that politicians are dishonest bounders who change their minds and their opinions more often than you change your socks. If you think that, you risk missing the point. Politicians tend to be brilliant arguers. They don’t lose; they win arguments, even when they should lose. They know how to argue or debate.

And you can do this as well. It is a matter of knowing some simple techniques. That is what politicians do. They do not all enter the world with innate tough skins, bulldog tenacity and hyper-intelligence.

Let us stick with politicians for a moment and look at a single example of how they win arguments. They don’t answer the question asked of them.

It is as simple as that. Watch them on the news and you will see. They will not answer a question immediately, unless they really know their onions. More usually they will be evasive for a while. They will go off on a little diatribe during which they will refer to the political credo of their party, then they will eventually give a round-about answer that more or less answers the question, but which no one notices because they have diverted you from the original and you are either left marvelling at their intelligence or cursing their audacity. But they will have had their say.

The political answer is only one of several manoeuvres that you need to spot and understand. If you can see what other people are doing in a debate, then you can understand and apply the appropriate measures that can undermine their arguments. Arm yourself with, say, half a dozen of these little techniques and your confidence in such matters may soar. We will look at this in the chapter on the Lost Art of Sophistry.

UNDERSTAND HOW PEOPLE MAKE DECISIONS

I am sure you will have marvelled at the wisdom of some people. And at the same time cringed and cursed the incompetence and rank stupidity of others. Decision-making is a fascinating study in itself. Whether it is a world leader making an unbelievably important and far-reaching decision, a top banker deciding how to handle his bank’s finances or a general ordering a hazardous mission, all of them think that they are making a balanced, bias-free decision. Yet they probably are not. When it comes down to it, a decision may seem multi-faceted, complex and based on massive data, yet ultimately it will be stripped of all of these complexities and data to become a simple final choice one way or the other.

If you can understand basic decision-making you may make life a bit easier for yourself.

CULTIVATE A SENSE OF HUMOUR AND CONSIDER TELLING THE ODD JOKE

Well, don’t you envy those joke-tellers? It really is a useful thing to be able to do. Especially if you can drop in a quick-witted quip or an appropriate anecdote that isn’t going to bore everyone or make them cringe.

I don’t mean that you have to aim at doing a stand-up routine suitable for the Comedy Club, but you can learn ways of delivering a good wheeze to get them chuckling.

CULTIVATE YOUR MEMORY

There is nothing worse than having to excuse yourself for not remembering someone, forgetting their name or what they do. People will recognise you, recall your name and oddities, so why can’t you?

Well of course you can. It is lazy not to and it is arrogant to think that you don’t need to. If you want to shine, lick that memory into shape.

As we shall see, it is not that difficult.

KNOW THYSELF

All of this is working towards better awareness of yourself, your strengths, your weaknesses and your emotional tendencies. If you can understand yourself better then you can interact with others more effectively. And if you can understand other people then you are on your way to the most useful type of communication with them. This is what life is about.

BASIC KNOWLEDGE OF EVERYTHING

That might sound a tall order, but really it is not difficult to pick up the rudiments of anything. You may shy away from some areas in the belief that you know nothing about a subject. Take mathematics as an example. Many people struggle with elementary mental arithmetic and positively shudder at the mention of anything as rarefied as trigonometry or differential calculus.

But you don’t need to be a maths whiz to get by. Everyone can learn a few basic mental arithmetic techniques to shine. And if you just brush up on a few facts then you will be surprised at how well you can hold your own at dinner parties.

Three Facts Are Generally All You Need

It is true: if you just know about three facts on a subject, such as you will find in the chapters of Part 2, then you can, by dropping them into a conversation, or expounding on them, really appear to know your onions – or your physics, Latin or mathematics.

In the second part of this book we are going to look at all sorts of things, from art to Zen, from poetry, philosophy and economics to science, sport and cooking. None of these chapters will be enough to get you a degree, but they will cover sufficient points to help you get by.

So, you may not be a genius, but you can still shine.

2

HEURISTICS AND RULES OF THUMB

A heuristic can make you smart,

And a rule of thumb can too.

Whether it be science or art,

These things will work for you.

Professor Phineas J. Stackpool

Phrenologist and mesmerist

Judgement is difficult. No one ever really teaches you how to do it. Parents may drum their code of morals into you, teachers may tell you what society expects, but when it comes down to it, you end up making your own decisions for good or ill. You may think that your teachers, professors and all the people who occupy positions of trust and responsibility have a special handle on judgement, but the truth is that they don’t. Even geniuses don’t always get it right. So what hope is there for mere heads of government? They are as much in the dark as you and I. Yet it need not be as gloomy as that, if you understand a little about how we think. If you can do that then you are on your way to making mental short-cuts. And that will help you see what this book is all about.

WAS KING SOLOMON REALLY ALL THAT WISE?

Judgement is a highly complex thought process. In an ideal world, judgement would be a matter of pure logic, wherein following a sequence of steps would lead to a correct solution. Yet experience teaches us that judgement can be extremely difficult, whether it is a straightforward decision between two options or selecting one item from many, all of which have both positive and negative factors to consider.

Good judgement is generally thought to be related to wisdom, as illustrated by the Biblical tale of the Wisdom of Solomon. The story goes that two harlots went to King Solomon, both claiming to be the rightful mother of a child. One claimed that her own baby had been swapped for the other’s dead baby during the night. The other denied it vigorously. Solomon asked for a sword and offered to have the baby cut in two, with one half to be given to each mother. The rightful mother pleaded for this not to happen and for the baby to be given to the other mother. Solomon judged that she must be the true mother.

Now, is that not an example of good, clear, clinically detached judgement? I leave you to make up your own mind. But, on the other hand, ancient writers acknowledged that decision-making could be flawed by personal desires that had no relationship to logic or wisdom, as in Homer’s account of the Judgement of Paris. This comes from the Iliad.

At the nuptials of Thetis and Peleus all the gods had been invited except for Eris, the Goddess of Discord. This peeved her no end, so she tossed an apple into the hall with the inscription, ‘for the fairest.’ Hera, Athena and Aphrodite all claimed it. Wise god that he was, Zeus declined to make the judgement but gave the task to a mortal, Paris, son of King Priam of Troy. All three goddesses attempted to bribe him: Hera with power and riches; Athena with victory in battle and Aphrodite with the love of the most beautiful of mortal women, Helen, the wife of King Menelaus of Sparta (usually known as Helen of Troy). Paris succumbed to Aphrodite’s bribery, awarded her the apple and gained Helen – and the consequence was the Trojan War.

What do you think of that? Was it a good decision or a faulty one?

The point is that people have to make decisions and judgements every day in every walk in life. The decisions may be good, fair or bad, and the consequences have to be lived with. In many instances, judgement may be skewed because the person making the judgement may approach the situation with a particular emotional viewpoint, or he or she may be swayed by an argument in a particular manner. In other words, bias may be introduced.

In complex systems involving the selection of one option from a great range of possibilities judgement can be extremely difficult. It seems that when faced with a great number of options people try to trim the number down to manageable proportions, and then further subdivide until the best fit is obtained. It is not always done in a mathematically precise or even a logical order. What seems to happen is that we use rules of thumb, or heuristics, to help us.

ALGORITHMS AND HEURISTICS

I am not going to get bogged down with the concept of what ‘thought’ is. That is one of the toughest of philosophical questions. Let us just accept that you do a lot of thinking and that you are a really intelligent human being. You can be assured that you are, since you are reading this book and following everything so far.

Let us take it a step further and suppose that you understand what thought is and that you want to build a thinking machine. People do this for a living, you know. Not just in the realms of science fiction but in the lab.

Scientists working in the field of cybernetics strive to create computer programmes that will think and ultimately feel and function in a manner akin to a living system. The goal of producing Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a daunting one, yet much headway is being made, at least in some ways. For example, computers have been designed to perform ‘high-level’ skills, such as playing chess at grandmaster level. On the other hand, ‘low-level’ skills, such as recognition of a face, are proving almost impossible to achieve. In other words, the machine is not yet ready to take over.

There are two basic types of process that are programmed into AI machines: algorithms and heuristics.

Algorithms are named after the Iranian mathematician Al-Khawarizmi (AD 790–840). This man was a genius. He invented the subject of algebra, the name of which has been derived from his book Al-Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah. He explained the use of zero, developed the decimal system and had the term algorithm named after him.

An algorithm refers to a detailed sequence of actions which have to be performed in a finite number of steps in order to accomplish a task or solve a problem. In a cybernetic sense it is logical thought involving a purely mechanical, logical sequence of steps. Any computer programme is by this token an algorithm.

Heuristics are rules of thumb that are also integrated into AI programs. They are defined as being rules that are sometimes useful. They basically reduce or limit the search for solutions in areas that are difficult, complex or poorly understood. But a heuristic is not necessarily logical. While an algorithm will always deliver a logical answer, a heuristic may not always do so.

Yet another meaning of heuristic is that it is ‘learning by experience’ or ‘finding out for oneself.’

In a computer programme for playing expert chess, for example, this mix may be advantageous. Chess-playing is a mixture of cold logic, which is algorithmic, and non-logic, which is heuristic.

ALGORITHMS MAY BE SLOW, HEURISTICS ARE FAST

In mathematics the application of algorithms should lead to a logical answer, although it may take a long time to arrive at the solution. Heuristics can also be applied, and can shorten the working of a problem, to produce an answer that is usually fairly accurate, although it may not be so. Suppose you need to set aside an amount of money to pay your tax. You go to an accountant and ask him the question. He may not want to give you an answer, because he wants to go through all of your books and finances and do the calculations in order to give you an accurate figure. That is, he wants to go through an algorithmic routine. Yet that may not be what you want. You want a quick ball-park figure so that you can plan. You want an estimate, or a guesstimate. You want a heuristically chosen figure.

HEURISTICS ARE UNCONSCIOUS RULES OF THUMB

The term heuristic is of Greek origin, meaning ‘serving to find out or discover.’ The word was introduced into the English language in the early 1800s, at which time it meant ‘a useful, even indispensable thought process for solving problems that cannot be handled by logic and probability theory.’

Albert Einstein used it in 1905 in the title of a paper on theoretical physics: ‘On a heuristic point of view concerning the generation and transformation of light.’ In this paper Einstein used the word to mean an approach to a problem that is necessarily incomplete given the knowledge available, and hence unavoidably false, but which is useful nonetheless for guiding thinking in appropriate directions.

Essentially, a heuristic is a thought process that we tend to use if not in place of logic, at least as a short-cut or rule of thumb. And the bulk of evidence shows that people working in complex situations of uncertainty tend to operate heuristically.

In general there are three situations or types of problem where they seem to be particularly suited. These are: where the problem is ‘fuzzy’ or not easily definable; where the problem is complex and not easily broken down; and where the problem is large, and there is limited time to solve it.

THE ‘SATISFICING’ HEURISTIC

Herbert A. Simon introduced the term ‘satisficing’ in 1957. His concept was that in difficult situations one may strive to obtain an outcome that is ‘good enough.’ It is essentially a corner-cutting process that people often opt for when time is running out, or when they have used up their available time without reaching a decision.

Rational theories of decision-making would propose that one chooses the best option available from all the alternatives on offer. Simon argued that people are more likely to satisfice, that is to achieve a good enough result, even though it is not necessarily the best. They effectively choose the first option that meets their minimum criteria, thereby using the minimum amount of mental energy.