The Power of Unconscious Thought
Posted on May 23, 2007
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Do you ever sleep on problems? Or wake up in the middle of the night with answers to problems that have been bugging you for sometime? Or your boss tells you to go home, things will be better in the morning? Well, you should to listen an interview with Linda Rising that talks about this phenomena.
The basic premise is that the majority of our thinking is done unconsciously. So the best way to tap into all that unused wasted thought time is to gathering as much information as you can about your problems consciously, and then go to sleep. So how do you know when you’ve gathered enough information? That’s easy, you feel tired, and you go to sleep. What you don’t do is burn the midnight oil or neck 10 pints of your favourite lager. You get good sleep. It not rocket science really.
Linda is a great person. I met her back in 1994 at an OOPSLA conference when I first started out on my doctorate. I was floundering in dross and detail, detail and dross. My then thesis supervisor was not really a specialist in the field of object-oriented design, metrics, patterns or heuristics. So no help there. However, given that Linda’s thesis was in this area she became my adopted mum, providing insightful glimpses into the world of software development as a whole. Communication was by email and we met up conferences. I came to the swift conclusion that the software development arena can be a very dirty place.
Nothing has really changed much there, but there are ways to make it better, if you think about it…
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[...] Wednesday. But I did sneak in a cheeky speaker dinner on Tuesday night. There I caught up with my long time friend and early mentor, Linda Rising and was unleashed to the full on madness that is Dan North. Also, I [...]