You don't have to write it down, although sketching out the problem
can sometimes make a problem clear if geometry is involved. Usually,
just talking to someone else helps you frame the issue. The other
person often doesn't have to say a thing, but by the time you're done,
you have a solution. Talking or writing helps us put a logical story
together, and in the process we find the missing step that produces
the solution.

The other half of your observation - that you 'worried' about your
problem for a few days is consistent with what many people have seen
in how they solve problems. My idea is that the brain needs a few
days to find connections or try out a few options. Invention is
rarely out of the blue, but from someone who's thought about it for a
long time, but not continuously. It also helps if you know the
subject very well, but not neccesarily in an intellectual way.

An extension of this idea is that if you really want to learn a
subject, try teaching it.

There are also people who are best described by the phrase, "I don't
know what I'm thinking because I haven't said it yet".


Bruce



Grant Erwin wrote in message ...
This isn't a posting about a problem. It's a posting about how I think.
I had a problem with one of my machines. I couldn't figure out what to do
about it. After a couple of days worrying away at it I got the idea to
write it up like a posting to this NG and then put it down and read it
fresh the next morning. Sure enough, when I read it like the problem came
from someone else, laid out clearly just the way I like it, the solution
immediately came to me!

I think better when faced with a problem which is written out logically.
This is what happens when you take a guy whose background is mathematics
and electrical engineering, with a lifetime of education, and put him in
a machine shop. I bet if I'd started out as a machinist's apprentice when
I was 18, at my now-ripe-old-age of 51, I'd think better when presented
with a problem on the fly, on my feet, in the shop.

Go figger.

Grant Erwin