This was another reason Hadamard’s subjects gave for why they were reluctant to use words: they were afraid of the false precision writing forces onto thinking. They were afraid of premature precision and the confusion it breeds. By thinking in blurry images, or tensions of the hands, or sounds, they could keep their thoughts accurately vague in... See more

When we put words to a thought, we have to compress something that is like a web in our mind, filled with connections and associations going in all directions, turning that web into a sequential string of words; we have to compress what is high-dimensional into something low-dimensional.

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

If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn’t written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.

whenever I write what I think about a subject, it always turns out that my thoughts do not hold up on paper? No matter how confident I am in my thoughts, they reveal themselves on the page as little but logical holes, contradictions, and non sequiturs.

Now, language is to the mind precisely what the arch is to the tunnel. The power of thinking and the power of excavation are not dependent on the words in the one case, on the mason-work in the other; but without these subsidiaries, neither process could be carried on beyond its rudimentary commencement.

writing—and reading, seriously, the writings of others—is a way to collect stepping stones: ideas that have been stabilized enough that they can carry us as we walk deeper into the thought space.

By writing something down and making sure it is solid, we can offload that thought from working memory and instead use it as a building block for the next step of the thought.

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