Quick brain teaser for kids and adults: Your answer, please?

In which direc­tion is the bus pic­tured below traveling?

Do you know the answer?

The only pos­si­ble answers are “left” or “right.”

Still don’t know?

Keep read­ing for the answer and explanation…

When pre-school chil­dren are shown this brain teas­er, they often answer “left.” Why? “Because you can’t see the door.”

(This works in coun­tries where you dri­ve on the right side of the road, like the US and con­ti­nen­tal Europe; it would be the reverse in coun­tries where you dri­ve on the left side, such as the UK)

Feel pret­ty dumb now, don’t you? I did too!

This teas­er illus­trates a good con­cept about how our mem­o­ry works. Imag­ine if our mem­o­ries were absolute­ly per­fect. On the one hand, you might have been able to answer this puz­zle cor­rect­ly, since you could com­pare this image to all the school bus images you have in your mind, and only the ones going left would match.

On the oth­er hand, imag­ine tru­ly remem­ber­ing every sin­gle detail of every sin­gle day of your life. It would be insur­mount­able to fil­ter through all that data retrieve use­ful information…you prob­a­bly would­n’t have been able to answer the ques­tion in hours or even days, try­ing to retrieve and process every sin­gle bus-relat­ed memory.

Think about that next time you com­plain about your memory…

–> For more men­tal stim­u­la­tion, you can vis­it our page with Top Brain Teasers, Games and Illusions–for Teens and Adults of Any Age