I’ve been thinking about this crosswording issue. The application that comes to mind is just how experience with a particular intellectual field yields much more ease of working within those confines. The analogy I’m thinking of: if you spend a semester engaging with the ideas in a particular class, talking to the professor, asking questions, thinking about it on your own time (i.e., the equivalent of doing the crossword every day), then when a test or paper comes along, you can, in essence, “see the matrix,” providing nuanced, insightful answers that just come naturally to you (i.e., like the tricky crossword clue.)

Wow, they really give you no time! At MIT, for example, the drop date is three weeks before the last day of classes. Though I guess a full week of courses should be enough to make a decision on whether or not to take a particular course.

The clue was “Exclusive, in a way” and I had put down “_la_ni_h” as my answer. The other intersecting words gave me no clue as to what the missing letters could be. I thought for awhile before finally starting to a different section of the puzzle. Than I returned to it and got a few ideas:

1. From experience, there generally tends to be a pattern of vowels and consonants.

2. Certain vowel combinations appear more often than others (how many English words can you think of with an “ae”? More often then not, English words have “ea”.)

3. Certain consonant/vowel or consonant/consonant combinations appear more often than others. (Which do you see more often at the beginning of a word: “St” or “ts”).

While these rules are more or less current is certain situations, in this case they led me to enter in “clannish” as my answer.

The point is not that I got the answer but that by letting my subconscious mind work, rather than my conscious mind, I was able to discern which rules applied where and how they applied. Also of interest is the order in which I used these “rules” to arrive at my answer applied, another thing my conscious mind wasn’t able to discern at first.

Any thoughts on how this applies to school??

I can spend 5 minutes trying to figure out the answer to a crossword puzzle hint, leave it alone for 5 minutes or so, and be able to solve it in 2 seconds upon looking at it again : )

If we really understood how that worked and how we could optimize it, it would be an amazing study hack.

Thank you for the excellent additions. In reference to your final point, did you read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink? There’s an interesting chapter on how students can accurately predict how well a professor will be rated by his class just by seeing a few second clip.