It seems crazy, right? Getting your pocket picked? I mean, wouldn't you feel a hand reaching its way into your *pants*, for God's sake? It couldn't happen to you - you're too smart for that!

Maybe it wouldn't. But it certainly seems to happen to a lot of people. According to the AI summary I just read, it might be something like 400,000 incidents DAILY. That's a lot of pockets. Are those people just dumb, or oblivious?

I seriously doubt it. We're all susceptible to having our attention overwhelmed, to being misdirected. Watch this video of a pickpocket plying his trade on stage at a Ted Talk for an entertaining demonstration. It's pretty simple - by making the volunteer focus on multiple things at once, the pickpocket overwhelms his attention to the point where he can't notice the pickpocket removing his watch, or reaching into his pocket.

Like it or not, that's the way our brains tend to function. It's why tourists focused on sightseeing and their maps are distracted, easy marks. It's (one of many reasons) why texting and driving is such a bad idea. It's why writing helps us think. It's why multitasking doesn't work. The number of ideas we can juggle mentally or things we can notice at the same time is pretty low, no matter how intelligent we are.

When you're feeling confused or overwhelmed by a GRE question, it's pretty likely that you're not respecting the limitations of your working memory. You can't reasonably expect it to remember every detail of a passage. You can't reasonably expect it to process an entire word problem after reading it. The test is designed to be challenging by making questions abstract, wordy, and / or complex. Don't play into its hands by trying to brute force through these questions with no thought of strategy.

Luckily, we have ways of dealing with the GRE's misdirection. We learn how to simplify sentences and recognize their functions, so we can cut through some of the clutter. We learn how to break down math problems and RC answer choices piece by piece. Over time, with disciplined practice, we can turn these strategies into habitual procedures that make us better test-takers, and our scores go up.

The Bottom Line

Your brain isn't supposed to hurt when you're working on a GRE question. If you are feeling confused or distracted, it could well be that you're trying to process too many bits of information at the same time. Having a more methodical approach - in which you focus on one thing at a time - is more likely to produce clarity.