The Sphex wasp will sting a prey such as a cricket only enough so that it will be paralyzed. The wasp will then carry the prey to her nest, leave the paralyzed prey at the entrance of her burrow and check to make sure that all is well inside the burrow. Then she drags the prey into the nest and leave her eggs with the paralyzed prey never to come back again. When the eggs hatch, the newborn baby wasps will have the still alive and fresh (but paralyzed) prey to consume.

Through observation the wasp appears to have an unusually high level of intelligence, but upon further inspection it becomes obvious that this routine is rigidly programmed. If the paralyzed cricket is moved back when the wasp checks inside the nest, the wasp will drag the cricket back to the entrance and recheck inside the nest. On one recorded occasion this happened forty times with the exact same result.

When a dog sees it's owner throw it's favorite bone over a fence, the dog may see the bone on the other side of the fence and bark in frustration. The dog may see that there is a hole in the fence a good distance off but won't realize that by running to the hole and crawling through the hole, the dog can get to the delicious bone. In the problem space that the dog perceives, running to the hole = running away from the bone while in an abstracted problem space running to the hole = running towards the bone.

Both examples use creatures without the same level of intelligence as humans but the idea still applies to us all. We make the same mistakes over and over again because we don't notice the sameness of the repetitions. We can't get to our goal because we can't remap the problem space. We are at the highest echelon amongst creatures of this planet, but the further back we pull our perceptions and the higher up we raise our consciousness, our actions and thoughts may also seem rigid, mechanical, and just plain stupid.