Sleepy insights

[jack]

Apropos to my sleepyness my ideas from last night were not amazing, but all were fairly good. A wonderful quote on the subject from The Universe of Discourse is:

The next morning I remembered nothing but that I had had a "clever" inspiration while guzzling whisky from the bottle. "Oh, no," I muttered, "What did I do?" And I went to the computer to see what damage I had wrought. I called up the problematic part of the program, and regarded my alcohol-inspired solution. There was a clear and detailed comment explaining the solution, and as I read the code, my surprise grew. "Hey," I said, astonished, "it really was clever." And then I saw the comment at the very end of the clever section: "Told you so."

I don't know what to conclude from this, except perhaps that I should have spent more of my life drinking whiskey. I did try bringing a flask with me to work every day for a while, about fifteen years ago, but I don't remember any noteworthy outcome. But it certainly wasn't a disaster. Still, a lot of people report major problems with this strategy, so it's hard to know what to make of my experience.

One's subconcious is sometimes witty. And sometimes effective.

Coincidently, recently, I've got the hang of commenting my code well! Cool.

That blog, by Mark Dominus, is very intriguing. I think fanf or senji linked to it, but every few days he has something to say about something obscure but relevent to every day life, that always makes me think. If I had the time it's a good example of the sort of discourse I would like to output.

Comments

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I often have my best insights -- and do quite well at drudgework -- when I'm just slgihtly tired or oiled. Sometimes a pint at lunchtime really does help.

I think both are removing wibble and distraction and letting one get on with it!

[simont]

I think that's a good explanation for the drudge-work flowing more easily, but I have a different theory about insight and intuition. When you're tired or drunk, it becomes harder to think coherently; instead of your mind being filled by an orderly sequence of closely related concepts proceeding from a beginning to an end, it instead becomes filled up with random concepts from wildly varied contexts drifting around aimlessly and bashing into one another. And this is fertile ground for creative insights and intuitions: it's one thing to be trying to understand DNA in a lab which has a spiral staircase, but in order to discover the double helix you have to be thinking of DNA and looking at the staircase at the same time. Allowing concepts from all over the brain to collide in a disorderly mess is the chaos from which surprising insights arise.

At least, that's the way it seems to work for me. I don't feel as if I've been genuinely creative very often, but when I do it's usually because two thoughts collided in my head which it had never occurred to me to put next to one another before, and this is certainly something that happens more often when I'm tired.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Hmm. They're related -- the turning off of inhibiting bits of your brain. But in my case for drudgery turning off distractions and in your case for insight turning of embarassment.

That does make sense, cool.