It's not the spoon that bends, it's your mind.

As a child I had taken a test, where I was asked to decide the direction of rotation a certain fast moving teddy bear. Turns out it was visual illusion, teddy was never turning, but the mirrors around it were doing a lot. It acts as a good test for verifying the initial line of attack of an underdeveloped brain (like that of a child) towards a decision problem. Some kids see it turning clockwise, some anti-clockwise.

As a high-school-er, I came across the ideas of rotational mechanics where the initial choice of positive direction, finally decided the sign of the final torque. Though insignificant from the result perspective, it could lead to funny physical interpretations; the bridge rotates negatively with respect to train etc.

In computer science, recursion versus dynamic programming holds the exact same clockwise/anti-clockwise relationship in a vector space.

In the whole of engineering, algorithmic problem solving versus optimization based problem solving are another equivalent analog.

In statistics, it is precision versus recall.

In information theory, it is bias versus variance.

Overall, it is a battle we all experience every day in our minds, the kids who choose anti-clockwise are biased learners who make quick decisions but deal badly with noise when subsumed with holistic picture, are more precise, top down strategy makers(recursion), choose the impersonal frame of reference as true. The kids who choose clockwise are holistic learners, slow decision makers, understand the details too well but miss the big picture some times, are more creative and have higher recall, hence have like 5 different ways of solving a problem and choose the personal frame of reference as true.

It’s obvious every kid in today's world, learns stuff which is anti to his nature many times just to survive. It is obvious; going to school is painful, surviving in exams hard. It is also obvious the experience and suffering of going to school puts pressure on you and makes you better.

I see one kind of thinkers becoming extremely good at the other kind over time. I see the insightful ones are the ones who have suffered a bit more. I see putting pressure on yourself by challenging your dominant tendencies to be the path to self-development, happiness and liberation. I feel it’s the only way.

PS: Thoughts over a quite weekend near the beach.