Here is a situation. You need to make a choice between A and B. You are extremely indecisive about which one to pick up. A sounds just as good as B and B sounds just as good as A.

Let me take a real life situation to make it sound more real. You want to eat. Your first impulse was to eat Pasta at Little Italy. But immediately, you got another impulse to eat Dal Makhani at Tandoor. And now you end up in a state of indecisiveness. You want to eat Pasta just as much as Dal Makhani and you want to eat Dal Makhani just as much as Pasta. And you have to make an absolute choice and you have to pick just one. Well, you won’t say, ‘Let me eat Dal Makhani today and tomorrow I’ll eat pasta’. No. The impulse is to eat now. You won’t have the same mood tomorrow.

What do you do? How do you make the choice.

I’ll tell you the method we devised in our college days. But before that, let me say something that you probably didn’t realize in this state of indecisiveness. Your inclination is not equally divided over the available choices. You’ll have a small percentage more on one side. Just a tiny bias towards one choice even though both of them sound equally interesting. It’s just that you can’t see this bias. Don’t ask me why you can’t see this bias. I don’t know. It’s just that you can’t.

So, here is the method to find out which choice has got your bias. Toss a coin. If it’s head, you go for A (or Dal makhani). If it’s tail, you go for B (or Pasta). Don’t be put off so soon. I am not finished yet. So, you toss a coin. Let’s say it’s head. So, it is decided that you would go for A (or Dal Makhani). Here is the interesting part. If your tiny bias was actually towards Dal Makhani (i.e. if you really at the core of your heart wanted to eat Dal Makhani rather than Pasta), you’ll go to Tandoor and have Dal Makhani. However, if your bias was for Pasta, you’ll suddenly change your mind and choose to eat Pasta even if the coin chose Dal Makhani for you.

Not convinced? Well, the reason it works is that you don’t detect that you have a tiny bias to eat Pasta because you haven’t made the choice yet to not eat Pasta. But once it is decided that you will not eat it; once all the cloud of indecisiveness is over; once you have started heading towards Tandoor, your heart cries and calls out, “Hey, I want to eat Pasta only”.

Still not convinced? Well, try it sometime.