Riddle Me This...

A cowboy rides into town on Friday, stays for three days and leaves on Friday. Explain. I've always loved little riddles and brain-teasers like this. I remember this one because it's one of the few I could answer correctly and almost immediately without looking up or waiting for the answer: the cowboy's horse is named Friday...

It's said that riddles like this are a good test of one's ability to "think outside the box", to catch the wordplay or misdirection that's often contained within them, to think in metaphors or to challenge one's assumptions. Here's one I wasn't able to answer:

"Money is right above my reach, I’m barely staying out of The Emergency Room (It is right below me), Room #3 is to my left, Room #5 is to my right with a 5% interest rate. What am I?"

Now stop reading and give yourself time to solve this one... When I saw the answer, I was really disappointed, because that answer was literally right in front of me, it's in front of me while typing this post even. The answer is: it's the number 4 key on the QWERTY keyboard I use to write my daily posts!! $ is money, ER (an abbreviation for Emergency Room) are the two letters immediately below the number 4 key, the #/3 key is to the left and the 5/% key is to the right. Why couldn't I see that? Well, that's one of the qualities of these riddles I love; they often show us how blind we are to our own mental blocks and prejudices.

Here's one that can be solved after taking some time to think about it. I did, so you can too; this one is, as far as I can see, simply a test of one's ability to think logically:

Three playing cards in a row. Can you name them with these clues? There is a two to the right of a king. A diamond will be found to the left of a spade. An ace is to the left of a heart. A heart is to the left of a spade. Now, identify all three cards.

With some mental mixing and matching most will be able to come up with the answer, which is: Ace of Diamonds, King of Hearts, Two of Spades.

I'd like to give you one more, one that's been used on me years ago. This one I believe people a lot younger than me will have a lot less trouble solving:

A father and son are in a horrible car crash that kills the dad. The son is rushed to the hospital; just as he’s about to go under the knife, the surgeon says, "I can't operate - that boy is my son!" Explain.

So, this one I couldn't solve all those years ago, and that says something about me. Remember I said that some riddles show to us our own prejudices? Well, this is one of those. The answer I produced, after a lot of thinking was that the father was one half of a gay married couple. It took me a long time to get to the wrong answer; the right answer is of course that the surgeon was the boy's mother... The thing is, my answer was my brain's way to make the surgeon a male; it never even occurred to me at the time that the surgeon could be a woman!

The only defense I have for my apparent gender bias is that this same riddle was used in a study on gender bias, and that I'm part of a majority that gets this one wrong. One of the researchers said in an article about this study that "when it comes to gender, we fixate on women's reproductive functioning, and we sort of allot competence to men", and that these gender biases are formed very early in life. Well, I just thought this was an interesting and perhaps revealing topic for today's post. Here's the article on the gender bias study: BU Research: A Riddle Reveals Depth of Gender Bias. Linked below is the video I stumbled across that gave me the idea to share this with you all. Watch how most, if not all answers this mini-panel comes up with assign a male to the role of CEO, even the female that is a CEO herself! I guess we have a way to go yet on the road to gender-equality...

Oh, you want some more brain-teasers you say? Well here they are: riddles.com !

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