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Comment by ToonDoom | Hacker News Reader

During my maths degree I would often try to solve problems last thing at night. If I could not solve a problem. I’d Go to sleep. I would have no recollection of solving the problem but in the morning I would often be able to immediately solve the problem.

This could have been down to a fresh brain but the speed at which I would solve the problem in the morning and pretty much just know the solution I’m convinced I was solving the problem in my sleep and then basically just writing it down when I woke.

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In the programming fields, we call this putting in 'on the back burner'... don't spend too long on a single problem. Just put in the back of your brain and come back to it.

Background Thread Processing ( Learning ).

I wrote the story about Rust where the programming concepts were hard to grasp and most just give up the first time trying to learn Rust. Normally months or years later, it clicked the 2nd time around for whatever reason.

It's an effective method of learning. Expose your brain to the concept, then walk away, come back the next day it later on, repeat. Continue to do this and you'll eventually understand. Repetition is the key to mastery, after all.

This happens to me constantly with CS problems. I work on a problem at night, go to sleep and the answer suddenly comes to me when I'm driving to work.

I have the issue where if I'm stuck on a problem and try to sleep on it, I wake up as tired as if I had stayed up working. My brain seems to never completely shutdown and rest. Have you ever experienced that? Any suggestions?

I guess I don't try to "sleep on it". I just tell myself I'll tackle it another time and go to bed. I have amazing sleep hygiene and I tend to use one dream from a set of dreams to fall asleep. Somehow I still wake up and have the solution the next day even though it was never my intent.

Well, that's how we work.

Even if you design the whole thing today, wait at least till tomorrow: you'll have a much better solution.

This! The subconscious mind is FAR more powerful than the conscious mind..

It's the part of the mind which is always operating.. A sure-fire tactic is to ask yourself a question right before bed, and allow it to do it's thing

It is also very chaotic, so your answer might not come and you just dream of slicing pickles for Angela Merkel or something similarly ludicrous.

You nailed it. Most of the time, we don't even know why we just did a particular action. Our subconscious expresses an urge, and we usually just do it. Afterwards, our conscious mind rationalizes the decision with some sort of logic which people will defend to the death.

It is possible to communicate with the subconscious. In fact, it is always communicating with us. Our society is so focused on the conscious mind that we tend to not notice. This is what anxiety is. The subconscious is trying to express an unmet need. The medical field tries to suppress and numb the symptoms instead of listening to your body.

Source: Nobody told me this. I discovered this while dealing with massive personal problems over many years. Operating under this assumption is how I overcame serious addiction, anxiety and depression. Meditation is a good way to calm to conscious mind so you can "hear" your subconscious and body.

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