My own experience, and much of what I’ve read, suggests a role of dreams and sleep in insight-generation. Perhaps you solve the problem while sleeping, but your brain doesn’t store the memory of figuring it out in detail because you’re asleep, and the flash of insight you feel in the shower is just remembering what you already figured out.
The little man could just be the promise to yourself to sleep on it, to literally work on the problem while asleep. And you need to walk away from the problem because conscious, deliberative approaches to problem solving will trample the delicate memory of the solution you arrived at while sleeping.
That’s certainly plausible! I don’t think it can be tied strictly to sleep because walking away from the problem for a few hours is often good enough. Similarly, suddenly remembering someone’s name at a party can happen just a few minutes after giving up, while you’re still at the party. (Or at least I’ve personally experienced this! And I think I recall others having experienced this too.)
But there might be something near here too. For instance, I’ve been told that the REM rhythms of 90 minutes actually continue throughout the day as well as at night while you’re sleeping. I’ve never tracked down this claim to evaluate it, but if it’s true it might suggest that there are particular times of day when this processing happens automatically in the background and other times when the processing needs to happen more consciously, roughly on 90-minute cycles. I’m speculating pretty wildly here though.
My own experience, and much of what I’ve read, suggests a role of dreams and sleep in insight-generation. Perhaps you solve the problem while sleeping, but your brain doesn’t store the memory of figuring it out in detail because you’re asleep, and the flash of insight you feel in the shower is just remembering what you already figured out.
The little man could just be the promise to yourself to sleep on it, to literally work on the problem while asleep. And you need to walk away from the problem because conscious, deliberative approaches to problem solving will trample the delicate memory of the solution you arrived at while sleeping.
That’s certainly plausible! I don’t think it can be tied strictly to sleep because walking away from the problem for a few hours is often good enough. Similarly, suddenly remembering someone’s name at a party can happen just a few minutes after giving up, while you’re still at the party. (Or at least I’ve personally experienced this! And I think I recall others having experienced this too.)
But there might be something near here too. For instance, I’ve been told that the REM rhythms of 90 minutes actually continue throughout the day as well as at night while you’re sleeping. I’ve never tracked down this claim to evaluate it, but if it’s true it might suggest that there are particular times of day when this processing happens automatically in the background and other times when the processing needs to happen more consciously, roughly on 90-minute cycles. I’m speculating pretty wildly here though.