Who’s Buried in Grant’s Tomb?
Here I go again. I am sitting in Dr. Ashcraft’s Foundations of Cognitive Psychology class as he asks what should be a rather simple question, “How many hands did Aristotle have?” The question asked to the entire class is truly meant to be answered straightforwardly but I can already feel myself making the same mistake again.
In situations like these, I generally find myself trying to get at the question’s true hidden intent. I am rarely satisfied to answer the question at face value with the obvious answer. After all, why would he be asking the question if there wasn’t more to it? This is college. There is no way it could be that simple. Could it? No. No, there must obviously be some hidden meaning.
So I look at the question again and try to determine if there are any clues to help me out. “Hands.” I think to myself. “Hands.” What could Dr. Ashcraft really mean by hands? On a farm, a hand can be a person, a worker or an employee. Is he asking how many people worked for Aristotle? Did Aristotle have employees? Maybe, but I am not sure. I know Aristotle was a teacher, so reasonably he had students. Could “hands” mean how many students he had, or maybe a count of the number of students that were assisting him? Is that what Dr. Ashcraft means? Is that what he is really asking? How would I know how many assistants Aristotle had? How could I find out? Should I google it? No, I’m in class, using my phone would probably be frowned upon. Next, I start thinking through my mental list of known philosophers, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, but I cannot remember the distinctions between them or their associations to one another. Eventually, I come to realize how far from the original question I have gone and in only a few seconds. The original question was only asking, “How many hands did Aristotle have?” Instead of simply answering it, I chose to go about making it vastly more complicated than it was.
So while sitting in class trying to reason out every possible meaning and extension of the word hand, I realized that once again I was doing what I always do. Put simply, I was overthinking it. The question is legitimately a simple, uncomplicated question; one Dr. Ashcraft posed incidentally to highlight the mental steps a person’s mind goes through when trying to answer a question.
Far too often, I find myself in a similar situation where I try to analyze a question from every potential angle. Alternatively, I find myself thinking through every possible interpretation of each word and their associated meanings until I reach a point of hair-pulling insanity.
When I reach this point, where I recognize that I am about to wretch my hair from my scalp as I rack my brain for answers to an endless series of questions, I stop myself and think about the helpful lesson I learned in my Biology class with Dr. Jef Jaeger.
Any student who has taken Dr. Jaeger’s class can tell you exactly “who is buried in Grant’s tomb?” For those who are unfamiliar with Dr. Jaeger’s favorite question, he poses this question to his classes as an example of a simple question with an obvious answer. The person buried in Grant’s tomb is, of course, Grant. The point he attempts to make with this question is to show that not every question asked is intended to trick you. Dr. Jaeger asks this question often and repeatedly during his lectures. Not to highlight how simple questions can be, but that many questions actually have simple, obvious straightforward answers. Moreover, that just because an answer is obvious or simple does not make it necessarily wrong.
His indirect advice became a hallmark in my quest to conquer my repetitious pattern of over thinking. Now when I’m posed with a simple question and realize that I am about to make the same mistake of falling down the rabbit hole of needlessly complex spiraling questions, I stop and ask myself, “Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?”
This mantra stops my cluster of inane questions and brings me back to clarity and focus. It helps to remind me that a simple answer is not always a wrong answer. So once again, when I am in class debating the intended meaning of a question – such as how many hands Aristotle had – I simply stop myself, remember that Grant is in Grant’s Tomb, and confidently answer that Aristotle had two hands.
Matt Helm has been in the Interactive Measurement Group since Spring 2018. Matt is majoring in Psychology at UNLV and hopes to graduate in Spring of 2020. After graduation Matt hopes to attend a Ph.D. program related to Psychology. Matt’s ultimate goal is to work as a professor of psychology at either a university or community college.