There is some evidence we can and in an easy way, by exploiting the effect of 'psychological distance'.

Instead of thinking about a problem solely in terms of here and now, we should project our mind to distant places and times, try to consider the problem from another person's standpoint and so on.  How would the problem appear to an inhabitant of a planet billions of light years away?

Research reported in Scientific American suggest this technique may really help us to be more inventive and creative.

And how did the prisoner divide the rope?

More specifically there is some recent research to suggest that trying to answer the TMA (say) very quickly without any study of the unit - just jot down the best guess you can come up with - and only afterwards reading the relevant bits of the course may improve retention significantly. See http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=getting-it-wrong&sc=MND_20091029

In fact it seems the effect could apply if we do no more than for example try the SAQ before the related section, or even read the unit introduction, section or unit summary etc. before tackling the body of the unit.

I found this idea intriguing and intuitively appealing, but of course that isn't evidence.

Plankalkül

The first high-level programming language was Plankalkül, published in 1948 by the German inventor Konrad Zuse.

This language was very advanced for its time and already displayed many of the same structures we see today. Below is a sample program, followed by a working equivalent in JavaScript.

The program is not at all hard to follow. The only somewhat obscure part is in the declarations e.g. V0[:8.0], where the :8.0 seems to be reserving memory space for an integer represented in 8 bits.

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=JAVASCRIPT>

/* Plankalkul example from Konrad Zuse
Original code:
P1 max3 (V0[:8.0],V1[:8.0],V2[:8.0]) => R0[:8.0]
max(V0[:8.0],V1[:8.0]) => Z1[:8.0]
max(Z1[:8.0],V2[:8.0]) => R0[:8.0]
END
P2 max (V0[:8.0],V1[:8.0]) => R0[:8.0]
V0[:8.0] => Z1[:8.0]
(Z1[:8.0] < V1[:8.0]) -> V1[:8.0] => Z1[:8.0]
Z1[:8.0] => R0[:8.0]
END
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalkcül

JavaScript equivalent follows
*/

function max3(v0, v1, v2)
{
	var z1;
	z1 = max(v0, v1);
	z1 = max(z1, v2);
	return z1;
}

function max(v0, v1)
{
	var z1;
	z1 = v0;
	if (z1 < v1)
	{
		z1 = v1;
	}
	return z1;
}

// Try functions out
document.write('The maximum of 2, 3 and 1 is ' + max(2, 3, 1));

</SCRIPT>