The hypothesis here is that if you work hard on a problem, you soak your subconscious with it. Wrestling with a problem helps you build a mental model of what you know and what you don’t—providing the subconscious with building blocks to work with. (You can’t have genuine intuition and inspiration in areas where you lack knowledge.) Then, once you... See more

the dreaming brain was not simply recapitulating or re-creating exactly what happened to them in the maze. Rather, the dream algorithm was cherry-picking salient fragments of the prior learning experience, and then attempting to place those new experiences within the back catalog of preexisting knowledge. Like an insightful interviewer, dreaming

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But the simple truth was that he didn’t know how it happened. He couldn’t explain it. His brain did it without his permission, the way his heart pumped blood or his lungs infused cells with oxygen. It latched on to patterns and sequences without his consent or, at times, his awareness and filled his head with a deluge of numbers and images. When he

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