The numbers based question was hilarious!!, specially to know that pre-school children can solve it in 5 mins. Try to show this question to a pre-school child and let us know what happens.
Our brain is just a amazing pattern matching machine. As soon as it is presented with a problem it starts to find patterns/relations in the problem along with going through the knowledge base it has acquired till now and trying different permutations and combinations to find the solution. In the number question, as soon as you read it, the brain will try to find patterns "using" the mathematical knowledge it has and it will keep on doing so until it gets frustrated an says WTF there is no relation here but it may happen that few days later you subconscious do find a pattern here based on "shapes" and not "numbers" but that is very very unlikely because as soon as we see numbers we think in numbers and not their shapes. If this problem was presented using shapes, anybody could have solved it in seconds.
Our brain is just a amazing pattern matching machine. As soon as it is presented with a problem it starts to find patterns/relations in the problem along with going through the knowledge base it has acquired till now and trying different permutations and combinations to find the solution. In the number question, as soon as you read it, the brain will try to find patterns "using" the mathematical knowledge it has and it will keep on doing so until it gets frustrated an says WTF there is no relation here but it may happen that few days later you subconscious do find a pattern here based on "shapes" and not "numbers" but that is very very unlikely because as soon as we see numbers we think in numbers and not their shapes. If this problem was presented using shapes, anybody could have solved it in seconds.