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Comment by zo7 | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to see research suggesting that this might be helpful, since I feel like I've stumbled on something similar. Lately I've had several instances where I've been completely stuck on a problem, so I'd stop everything and take a long hike on a trail or through some mountains. After taking a day of just literal wandering, I've found I'd be able to finally make progress on what I was working on once I pick it back up again, where I otherwise felt like I was hitting a wall. It's felt like my mind does some unconscious processing when I allow it to take a break, so it's encouraging to see some evidence to support that.

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I'm not a (neuro-, or any other) scientist, but I'm suspicious of the common narrative that sleeping on the problem => unconscious background processing => solution to the problem. IMO, when you're "stuck" you're basically in a local minima that's not good enough. With computers you just restart at a random point and continue, but people are really bad at being random.

Moreover, there's the: don't think about an elephant right now => you just thought of an elephant, "problem". That is, the more you've been thinking about the problem a certain way, trying to force yourself to think differently only reinforces the original line of thought, leading back to the same local minima.

Thus, IMO the more likely mechanism that walking away from a problem and coming back to it later leads to a better solution, is more that you get a better random restart, and you have time to forget the prior line of thought, so you're more likely to think differently / explore a different branch of the search tree.

Except that's the point of the article – PCD/napping/etc works because the default mode network of your brain is more active when you're at rest than when it's focusing on something, and that it seems to be doing some "housekeeping" in your brain so to speak.

I don't think it's much like a minima, because I can go home, run some errands, cook dinner, surf the internet, read, etc, but when I'd come back the next morning I'd be just as stuck as the day before. For me it wasn't until I explicitly tried to do nothing (i.e. wander, as opposed to distracting yourself with other tasks) that I made progress.

(of course this is just anecdotal experience – not trying to frame this as The Way but found it interesting that there's some research about it)

> Thus, IMO the more likely mechanism ... is more that you get a better random restart

This doesn't explain the many times (at least in my case, for example) where a solution pops into your head before you "restart." In other words, your mind seems to be working on the problem even if you're not consciously working on it / haven't consciously restarted.

I think having solutions pop in your head is still compatible with my idea, if you consider it as a kind of intrusive thought, and also take survivorship bias into account. Intrusive thoughts usually have environmental triggers, which I argue is random enough. Moreover, often when the solution pops, you're not at the same place you were before: besides going to sleep, taking a walk or jog is also common advise (arguably sleeping usually also entails changing locale, so it's really a variation). IOW, you're "reseeding" your intrusive thought RNG.

Secondly, when the solution pops, my next thought is frequently "why didn't I think of this earlier?", meaning that the solution is quite obvious in hindsight, meaning had I just approached the problem slightly differently in the beginning, I wouldn't have to search very deep. So the solution didn't pop into my conscious thought because I've been mulling it over subconsciously, but rather the intrusive thought forced the problem back into foreground, but with a slight twist, and that quickly lead me to come up with the solution on the spot.

For intrusive thoughts where that didn't happen, I simply don't remember.

TBF, I admit I'm using a lot of weasel words, but I think it's possible to make my hypothesis more rigorous. Then you can design an experiment to falsify it, but I'm too lazy, and I'll leave that to real scientists. :-P

I agree with you and think that is true for me as well. I think of it more as being too constrained in my focus, the proverbial "can't see the forest for the trees". I face the same thing when playing card and board games. Sometimes you get stuck on one approach to your next move and can't break out of the loop. I find that watching someone play the same game and facing the same situation that I'm more able to view all the options and consider those paths. This is also one of the main reasons I always go out to lunch, it gives me an hour of something different to look at and think about and I (almost) always feel my stress decrease and feel more refreshed. I can't even count the number of problems I've "fixed" while in the shower or driving to work when I'm in a state of relaxed contemplation.

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