10 Clever Riddles to Warm Up Your Brain

1. The Horse Riddle

British scientists have found that during an average day, a horse had one pair of legs travel a total of 18 miles, while the other pair covered 19 miles. Are they really out of their minds, or can this really be true?

2. A Little Boy and a Tree

A little boy 100 centimeters tall put a nail into a tree as a mark for his own height. Three years later, he returned to the tree and put another nail at the point of his height. During this time, the boy has grown 20 centimeters taller, and the tree has grown 40 centimeters taller.What is the distance between the nails?

3. The Calendar Riddle

Three Fridays of a certain month have fallen on even-numbered dates. What day of the week was the eighteenth of that month?

4. The Snake and the Turtle

The snake is 110 years old. “How old are you?”, the snake asked the turtle. The turtleanswered, “My age was 10 times greater than was yours when I was just as old as you are now.”How old is the turtle?

5. The Family Portrait Riddle

A man is looking at a picture. ‘Whose picture are you looking at?” someone asked him. The man answered. “I was growing up being the only one in my family. And yet the father of the person in the picture is the son of my father.” Whose portrait the man was looking at?

6. The Dragonfly Riddle

Here’s a fun little puzzle just in time before vacations start. The dragonfly spends half the time of each single summer day (24 hours) on sleeping, one third of each summer day on dancing, and one sixth of each summer day on singing. The rest of summer time it decided to devote to preparing for the winter. How many hours during a summer day has the dragonfly spent on actually preparing for the winter season?

7. The King and His Daughter

The king wanted to give his daughter, the princess to an arranged marriage, but the princess did not want that. So the king said that the princess can herself decide her fate. At the public square she will need to draw a rock from a sack, either a white or a black rock. If she draws a black rock – it will be the king’s decision whom to marry, and she draws a white one – she can decide to marry whomever she wants. But the maid told the princess that the king was not going to play fair and would put two black rocks in the sack. The princess could not make the act of discovering two black rocks inside the sack public for fearing people will find out that their ruler was prone to injustice. But next morning she did something that saved her from arranged and unhappy marriage. What did she do?

8. The Wise Man Riddle

There once was a wise man in town, who had not been favored by the rulers of the city. It was decided to execute him. He was told that he could himself decide whether he lives or dies by his own last words. If his words turn out to be a lie, he will be hanged. If the words turn out to be true, he will be drowned. The wise man thought for a bit and said something that saved him from being executed. What did he say?

9. The White Hat Riddle

Two wise men were brought to the palace to determine who is wiser in the following test: in a dark room, from three bell-shaped hats, two white and one black, one will be placed on their head. And then they will stand facing each other in a room without mirrors. The first of the two wise men who correctly names the color of hat he is wearing will be recognized as the wisest. And so, the wise men stood for while, and each of them had a white hat on, and each of them only knew that the other one was wearing a white hat. Suddenly, one of them exclaimed: “I am wearing a white hat!” What would be this wise man’s way of thinking?

10. The Office Murder Riddle

A man is found murdered in his office. The body of the man is leaning over the desk, and a revolver is still clamped n his hand. There is a voice recorder on the table. Police turns onthe voice recorder of the deceased and immediately hear a recorded message: “I cannot live anymore. Life no longer has any meaning for me …”. After that, a sound of a shot is heard. Why do you think the police immediately concluded that the man was murdered, and this was not a suicide?

10 Mind-Blowing Theories That Will Change Your Perception of the World

Reality is not as obvious and simple as we like to think. Some of the things that we accept as true at face value are notoriously wrong. Scientists and philosophers have made every effort to change ourcommon perceptions of it. The 10 examples below will show you what I mean.

1. Great glaciation.

Great glaciation is the theory of the final state that our universe is heading toward. The universe has a limited supply of energy. According to this theory, when that energy finally runs out, the universe will devolve into a frozen state. Heat energy produced by the motion of the particles, heat loss, a natural law of the universe, means that eventually this particle motion will slow down and, presumably, one day everything will stop.

2. Solipsism.

Solipsism is a philosophical theory, which asserts that nothing exists but the individual’s consciousness. At first it seems silly – and who generally got it into his head completely deny the existence of the world around us? Except when you put your mind to it, it really is impossible to verify anything but your own consciousness.

Don’t you believe me? Think a moment and think of all the possible dreams that you have experienced in your life. Is it not possible that everything around you is nothing but an incredibly intricate dream? But we have people and things around us that we cannot doubt, because we can hear, see, smell, taste and feel them, right? Yes, and no. People whotake LSD, for example, say that they can touch the most convincing hallucinations, but we do not claim that their visions are “reality”. Your dreams simulate sensations as well, after all, what you perceive is what different sections of your brain tell you to.

As a result, which parts of existence can we not doubt? None. Not the chicken we ate for dinner or the keyboard beneath our fingers. Each of us can only be sure in his own thoughts.

3. Idealist Philosophy

George Berkeley, the father of Idealism, argued that everything exists as an idea in someone’s mind. Berkley discovered that some of his comrades considered his theory stupid. The story goes that one of his detractors kicked a stone with his eyes closed and said, “There I’ve disproved it!”

The idea being that if the stone really only exists in his imagination, he could not have kicked it with his eyes closed. Refutation of Berkeley is hard to understand, especially in these days. He argued that there is an omnipotent and omnipresent God, who sees all and all at once. Realistic, or not?

4. Plato and Logos.

Everybody has heard of Plato. He is the world’s most famous philosopher. Like all philosophers he had a few things to say about reality. He argued that beyond our perceived reality there lies a world of “perfect” forms. Everything that we see is just a shade, an imitation of how things truly are. He argued that by studying philosophy we have a chance of catching a glimpse of how things truly are, of discovering the perfect forms of everything we perceive.

In addition to this stunning statement, Plato, being a monist, said that everything is made of a single substance. Which means (according to him) that diamonds, gold and dog feces all consist of the same basic material, but in a different form, which, with science’s discovery of atoms and molecules, has been proven true to an extent.

5. Presentism.

Time is something that we perceive as a matter of course, if we view it at the moment, we usually divide it into past, present and future. Presentism argues that the past and the future are imagined concepts, while only the present is real.

In other words, today’s breakfast and every word of this article will cease to exist after you have read it, until you open it again. The future is just as imaginary, because time cannot exist before and after it happened, as claimed by St. Augustine.

6. Eternalism.

Enternalism is the exact opposite of presentism. This is a philosophical theory that says that time is multi-layered. It can be compared to a pound cake (however, unlike the time, a biscuit is not up for philosophical debate). All time exists simultaneously, but the measurement is determined by the observer. What he sees depends on which point he is looking at.

Thus dinosaurs, World War II and Justin Bieber all exist simultaneously but can only be observed from a specific location. If one takes this view of reality then the future is hopeless and the deterministic free will is illusory.

7. The Brain in a Jar

The “brain in a jar” thought experiment is a question discussed by thinkers and scientists,who, like most people, believe that human’s understanding of reality depends solely on his subjective feelings.

So, what is the debate? Imagine that you are just a brain in a jar that is run by aliens or mad scientists. How would you know? And can you truly deny the possibility that this is your reality?

This is a modern interpretation of the Cartesian evil demon problem. This thought experiment leads to the same conclusion: we cannot confirm the actual existence of anything except our consciousness. If this seems to sound reminiscent of the movie “The Matrix“, it is only because this idea was part of the very basis of the story. Unfortunately, in reality we have no red pills…

8. The Multiverse Theory

Anyone who has not spent the last ten years on a desert island, has at least once heard of “the multiverse”, orparallel universes. As many of us have seen, parallel words, in theory, are worlds very similar to ours, with little (or in some cases, large) changes or differences. The multiverse theory speculates that there could exist an infinite number of these alternate realities.

What’s the point? In a parallel reality you have already killed the dinosaurs, and you are lying under the ground at a depth of eight feet (because that’s what happened there.) In the other you might be a powerful dictator. In another you might never have even been born since your parents never met. Now that’s a memorable image.

9. Fictional realism.

This is the most fascinating branch of multiverse theory. Superman is real. Yes, some of you would probably choose a different story, for argument’s sake, Harry Potter might be real too. This branch of the theory argues that given an infinite number of universes,everything must exist somewhere. So, all of our favorite fiction and fantasy may be descriptive of an alternate universe, one where all the right pieces came in to place to make it happen.

10. Phenomenalism.

Everyone is interested in what happens to things when we aren’t looking at them.Scientists have carefully studied this problem and some of them came to a simple conclusion - they disappear. Well, not quite like this. Phenomenalist philosophers believe that objects only exist as a phenomenon of consciousness. So, your laptop is only here while you are aware of, and believe in its existence, but when you turn away from it, it ceases to exist until you or someone else interacts with it. There is no existence without perception. This is the root of phenomenalism.