When you have used a particular tool, item, or object for one sole purpose again and again, your brain can sometimes associate it with only that use. This concept is called functional fixedness.

“Thinking outside the box,” has become the annoying phrase we hear in commercials and bad business meetings. It stems from an actual psychological concept called functional fixedness. Funnily enough, ...

Any five-year-old has no trouble turning an old blanket and a couple of chairs into an impenetrable fort. But as we get older, knowledge and experience increasingly displace imagination and our ...