Why can you sit 2 hours trying to solve a programming/math problem, give up, go to bed & then when you wake up, solve the problem in 10 minutes?
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I take this answer from Barbara Oakley, in her book “A mind for numbers”.
Imagine the brain is like a pinball machine. When you start thinking about something, a ball is launched (representing your current thinking) and it bounces off of bumpers (different ideas). When you’re focusing, those bumpers are tightly packed together. So that ball is just bouncing around a tight little area of the brain. Well, what if the solution isn’t among the ideas in that tight space? You get frustrated and get nowhere.
So you go and relax, take a nap, have a walk, work out, whatever it takes to get your mind completely off the problem. Well guess what? That ball is still bouncing around, except now those bumpers are more spaced out. So that ball is going to bounce freely around your entire mind, and maybe it’ll find the bumper with the right idea. Now when you return to the problem, that idea is ready and waiting for you. Eureka!
I always liked an analogy that my professor used in college:
There is a little man who is responsible for retrieving information for you in your brain. When you go and ask for something, you try to tell him not only what you want but where he should look for it. The guy keeps looking and can’t find what you want.
Later, you stop worrying about it and he decides to look where he thinks it is and finds it immediately.
A simple analogy is that “you can’t see the wood for the trees”, when my engineers get stuck on hard faults we send them back to the hotel to get some food and a few beers, next morning the issue is typically solved in the first hour
I don’t really have a legit answer, just my own speculation. There’s more to your problem solving abilities than your conscious mind. Studies are increasingly showing that the subconscious mind actually contains most of your brain’s ability to process its environment (and is probably responsible for the sort of “gut feelings” where you size up the truth of a situation before you’ve actually realized specifically why something is wrong with it). I’ve noticed this effect in many different contexts. Like I love to write fiction and one huge thing I’ve noticed is your writing always looks considerably different the next day. Same day editing is almost worthless. Like you can’t just write something, read it immediately and expect it to be good. You want the most bang for your buck you have to wait a day and then read it again. All its flaws will pop out to you in a way they didn’t at all the day before. It will feel like it was written by a different person at that point. I’ve also noticed this with stuff like assembling furniture. I’ll have problems with one step and just can’t get the thing to fit like the instructions say. I’ll give up, go to bed, come back to it the next day and be able to get the thing to fit like magic in two seconds.
It has to do with your brain working better when you are relaxed. After a long period of focused work, you tend to narrow your focus and ignore answers that seem improbable. Taking a break allows you to get a fresh perspective on the problem and during the break you think of a solution you wouldn’t have when you were super focused.
I call it “incubation”. Some times, you fret over a problem and only see one (or a few) approaches, all of which were wrong. When you rest, your subconscious calls up other associations, and when you awake, the new solution presents itself.
This happens so often, I plan for it.
When you sleep, your brain takes in new information and combines it with stuff you already know, and makes new associations. Therefore helping create solutions.
Engineer here. Sounds like you described tunnel vision. You see it with chess players all the time. You get so focused on a certain solution that you fail to see the other, more sensible solutions.
That’s why getting a second pair of eyes is so valuable. Or taking a good long break and doing something else.
Most of my best solutions have come to me while binge watching Netflix or during a gym session.
When you sleep, the little librarian in you head, puts all the books into their proper place. When you wake up, everything is in order and the Dewey Decimal System is working a peak efficiency.
When you sleep, your brain works on that problem all night, even when you don’t know it. It also forms new connections needed to do something it couldn’t before. It is called Neuroplasticity or Neural Plasticity. This is one of the many important things about getting sleep.
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