106 Impossible Things Before Breakfast: Brain Boosting Techniques to Help You Achieve the Unachievable

by Robert Quine, John Nolan

Alice laughed. 'One can't believe impossible things.'

'I dare say you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen... 'Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'

~Lewis Carroll, Alice Through the Looking-Glass

Could there be a knife that never dulls? A gun with no moving parts? A broken clock that tells time?

Here, Dr. Michael Laufer and John Nolan reply, "Of course!" Through these conundrums, they show how to unleash the creative energies of the brain to solve even the knottiest enigmas. For instance, one Whether it's showering without water, driving a car without an engine, or using a computer without electricity, these are high-level challenges for breakout thinking. With this book, you'll stretch your minds and be primed to solve the next "impossible" problem before lunchtime.

256 pages, Paperback

First published October 18, 2010

Reviews

[Am Y · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book tries to get you to "think out of the box" and be "creative", by providing 106 so-called "impossible" challenges for you to tackle. All the challenges come with author-provided possible solutions. This would be fine if it weren't for the apparent lack of logic by the authors themselves.

For instance, the first challenge is to create a knife that never dulls. Some of the many solutions listed are: 1) to make a fraction of the cuts now made; 2) stop time; 3) use a laser beam to cut, instead of using the knife; 4) never use the knife.

Let's take solution #1. Even if you make only a small fraction of the cuts you had been previously making, the knife would still dull to some extent immediately after making just one cut.

Solution #2 - stop time so the knife would never dull. Are you kidding me? If we had wanted to consider impossible solutions like "stopping time", then anything would go. We could say, "get aliens to manufacture a special kind of knife using special technology" for example. As soon as I saw this proposed solution, I knew this book would be utter rubbish.

Solution #3 - can anyone see that this is exactly the same as solution #4? Using a laser beam to cut, instead of using the knife, is the same as never using the knife to cut, is it not?

There are more examples of absurdity, nonsense solutions, not-as-smart-as-you-think wordplay, etc in the further 105 challenges given. The only merit I can see in reading this junk is to see how good you are at spotting fallacies in the author's proposed solutions.

[Kalena Parks · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a light and humorous read... nothing too crazy or exciting.