More than 2,000 years ago, the philosopher Socrateswandered around Athens asking questions, an approach to find 1truth that thinkers venerated ever since. In modern times, the 2Socratic method was adapted for use in universities and became the dominant form of instruction for students learning philosophyand the law. The most recently national survey on the subject 3found that 97% of law-school professors use the Socratic methodin first-year classes. Socratic dialogues seem to work for the 4ancient Greeks. Are they efficient for people today? Recently, a 5group of researchers decided to find out. In a study published in the December 2011 issue of the journal Mind, Brain, and Education, four cognitive scientists from Argentina describe what happened when they asked contemporaryhigh school and college students a series of questions identified to 6those posed by Socrates. In one of his most famous lessons,Socrates showed a young slave boy with a square, then led him 7through a series of 50 questions intended to teach the boy how to draw the second square with an area twice as large as the first. Students in the 2011 experiment, led by researcher Andrea Goldin,gave answers astonishing similar to those offered by Socrates' 8pupils, even making the same mistakes he made. " Our results 9show that the Socratic dialogue is built on a strong intuition ofhuman knowledge and reasoning which persist more than 10twenty-four centuries after its conception," the researchers write. Their findings, Goldin and his co-authors add, demonstrate the existence of "human cognitive universals traversing time and cultures."