who here is congenitally illogical?

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i can do sudoku, but it's painful. give me a good crossword any day.

I just can't figure sudoko out at all, it is like a cat trying to figure out a can opener.

I find it really difficult to get past the questions raised by the question itself in a lot of these word problems, especially if they involve people who I think are behaving illogically.
Take the original scenario for example. Why wouldn't Cheryl just tell her friends her birth date? Why does she need to be coy about it? It's not like they want to know the year of her birth. When someone asks for your birth date do you say, I'll give you ten alternatives? Unlikely! Is a friendship with this woman going to involve a future of endless roundabout answers to what should be straightforward questions? Will her friends need to bring along a notebook and calculator whenever they happen to get together?
Sheesh, why bother?
Give me Sudoku any day.

are you also good at crosswords and word jumbles?

I'm extremely good at wordfinds. I have to find the words in the order they appear on the list just to make the the whole thing last a bit longer. I'm pretty good at crosswords. Not so good at cryptics. Word problems like the one you gave are my downfall.

are you good at descrambling mixed-up words? I'm fair at that [lots of practice here at the "change a letter" thread]. fair at crosswords as long as they are NOT the NYT or LAT ones [those are tough]. story problems I seem to not have the required neurons to tackle, unless they are very simple, then it merely takes me a week or so to figure them out after everybody else who immediately solved them with no real thought, forgot all about 'em.

One of my 'special interests' as a child was making up and deciphering codes, so I like the code breaker puzzles. Unscrambling words is good fun too.

you might make a good detective also.

I remember that joke from the 70's. The surgeon is his mother??? Mind blown

Back in 7th or 8th grade the math teacher sent us kids home with one of these logic puzzles. I can't remember if anybody figured it out. I sure didn't. Then he showed us how to use the elimination grid to figure it out and it was a lightbulb moment Trying to solve it without a grid is like trying to get a nail into wood without a hammer. Some people will eventually be able to do it but it will take a long time-most people will give up first, finding it too painful.

The right tool makes all the difference.

Not necessarily. My mind usually balks at those kind of problems, but I still consider myself smart. Perhaps a better way of putting it is that I feel some pride in my many fine aptitudes, but solving hard puzzles isn't one of them.

Even then, it's possibly more to do with the way I feel about hard puzzles. They annoy me, though I'm not saying there's anything wrong with them. I just dislike their unreal nature (if they don't happen in real life then why not use the time on problems that do?) and the fact that they've been contrived to be difficult (life is hard enough without deliberately making it harder). They remind me of the second half of my school days when they were setting me all this work I couldn't do, revealing my weaknesses and judging me for it. I suppose hard puzzles threaten my self-esteem, because that's got one of its main roots in my intelligence, and by definition "brain teasers" generally challenge intelligence.

Both my father and grandfather had some fairly logical criticisms of the newspaper crosswords they did. They said that the bits they didn't get usually ended up having stupid answers. I don't think it was all sour grapes. I saw those answers too, and couldn't see why they were supposed to be correct.

I don't always pass puzzles by though, and can find them fun. I was considering attempting the "nationality/pet/drink/cigarettes/colour" problem, and was tempted to get my pen and paper, but didn't realise it was allowed, and figured that my short-term memory wouldn't be strong enough to solve it in my head.

I doubt it is possible to do without writing it out. Noone has working memory capable of holding so many informations at once. There is at least 15 in the riddle, 30 if you count items, not relations as each information.
Average humans can hold and analyze up to 7 at a time.
I can hold/analyze to 5 but I usually use 3 information at max and write down everything else because I don't trust my "RAM" abilities.

Someone told me that she heard that Ben Bradley, the late head of the Washington Post newspaper, would do his paper's crossword puzzle in his head without looking at the page ( ie that he would memorize the 'downs' and the 'acrosses', and keep it all visualized in his head). For the moment- I choose NOT to believe it. But if I run across other sources that confirm that then -I will have to change my mind.

the AVERAGE human can hold only 7 discrete lumps of information in working memory at any given time, but there are of course geniuses who can far exceed this performances [such as savants] as well as people who can't equal this performance.

I couldn't give you any specific citations, but I had a college psychology professor tell a story of an exceptionally gifted chess master who could mentally play the game without requiring a physical board and pieces. He was able to keep all of this in memory and even 'rewound' the game five steps to prove to his opponent a critical error the opponent had made. That and just the ability to 'think several moves ahead' required for high level competitive chess play astounds me.

I think the bulk of functional high intelligence is having high memory capacity. IOW I don't think there are many people of average intelligence who can play chess.

I am alarmingly logical in most respects.

I've never been interested in chess.

If a man slips on a banana skin, why is that funny? If two men slip on two banana skins, is that twice as funny?