🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1751@scubed.UUCP> warner@s3dawn.UUCP (Ken Warner) writes:
>In article <206@intek01.UUCP> mark@intek01.UUCP (Mark McWiggins) writes:
>>Chuck Musciano:
>>> When I am faced with a problem...I sort of think about it...
>>> Sometime later, maybe days, maybe weeks, the full solution just pops into
>>>my head, Mark McWiggins
>>I've never been this systematic about it, but it works a lot the same way
>>my best stuff in the shower, or just lying in bed Saturday morning.
>
>Sometimes I will go to bed with an unsolved programming problem rattling around
>in my head and wake up with a complete solution.  It's as if I dreamt the
>solution.
>
>Ken Warner

This also works with the `simple' task of remembering something.
"What is the name of...?"  "Hmmm."  <think>, <Think>, <think>, <Think>
"Well, it'll come to me."

I suggest that the crucial part of this is the seemingly fruitless
"<think>, <Think>, <think> <Think>".  If you don't do that part it
*won't* come to you later (at least not with me).  It seems to me that
the initial thinking sensitizes me to what I want, then, while doing
something else, my brain `bumps into' the answer and out it pops.

Why this might also work with problem solving is harder to guess at.
It almost seems like the initial thinking `forks off' a background
task which keeps working.  

Except I don't like that explaination.  First, I am always suspicious
of attempts to explain the brain by saying it is like a computer.
Second, I think maybe it *is* quite like the memory example.

By thinking about the problem initially your brain might be
abstracting the puzzle, turning it into the stuff of pure thoughts
(God knows what that is).  Being now the stuff of pure thoughts, it is
compatible with the stuff you get from other activities.  It is now in
the same relm as taking out the garbage and trying to figure out how
to open the kitchen door without dropping everything.  While doing
this your brain might spot analogies to the computer problem you were
thinking about that day at work.  

Suddenly you scream "Ah, Hah!" and drop the garbage after all, but
there is the solution.

Related might be the concept that maybe one of the reasons we need
sleep is that that is when we do our garbage collection, reconcile the
books, and generally clean up in the corners.  After a good cleaning
related things might now lie next to each other, long lost things
might reappear, and new solutions might become obvious.  Hence the
saying: "I'll sleep on it."  Like computer garbage collection, maybe
the brain is not good for much else at the same time so we go curl up
and `sleep' in some safe place while.

Might be getting in over my head with this, so I'll quit now.

Kent Borg
kent@lloyd.uucp
or
...!husc6!lloyd!kent