In my experience, the motion that seems to prevent mental crowding-out is intervening on the timing of my thinking: if I force myself to spend longer on a narrow question/topic/idea than is comfortable, eg with a timer, I’ll eventually run out of cached thoughts and spot things I would have otherwise missed.
I’ve found the “set a 5 minute timer” meme to not-quite-work because it takes me like 15 minutes just to get all my cached thoughts out, before I get to anything original. But yeah this basic idea here is a big part of my “actually thinking for real” toolkit.
In my experience, the motion that seems to prevent mental crowding-out is intervening on the timing of my thinking: if I force myself to spend longer on a narrow question/topic/idea than is comfortable, eg with a timer, I’ll eventually run out of cached thoughts and spot things I would have otherwise missed.
I’ve found the “set a 5 minute timer” meme to not-quite-work because it takes me like 15 minutes just to get all my cached thoughts out, before I get to anything original. But yeah this basic idea here is a big part of my “actually thinking for real” toolkit.