Backburner

Today's article in the daily stoic leadership course says:

In a piece in The New Yorker titled, “The Myth and Magic of Generating New Ideas,” Rockmore shares anecdote after anecdote of mathematicians having a breakthrough when they weren’t worrying about the problem. Most problems are solved, he says, when you aren’t directly pointing your thinking at ideas for solutions, when the mathematician steps away from the whiteboard. “An initial period of concentration,” Rockmore writes, “need to be followed by some amount of unconscious processing...the key to solving a problem is to take a break from worrying, to move the problem to the back burner, to let the watched pot boil.”

After you read that, you get this journal prompt:

"What problem have you been dealing with? Why does it seem like there isn't a solution? That nothing works? What does trying the opposite look like?"

I don't really have any vexing problem right now. Maybe being broke. I try to be stingy and to save my money. I try not to spend. Do you think I should try the opposite? fill my credit card to the limit? lol jk. In my current challenge with finances, traditional frugality seems to fall short. Could a controlled, deliberate investment be the key, even if it seems counterintuitive?

In the book Think and Grow Rich, there's a section titled "Methods used by geniuses are available to you". He writes:

The major difference between the genius and the ordinary crank inventor, may be found in the fact that the genius works through his faculty of creative imagination, while the "crank" knows nothing of this faculty. The scientific inventor makes use of both the synthetic and the creative faculties of imagination. For example, the scientific inventor begins an invention by organizing and combining the known ideas, or principles accumulated through experience, through the synthetic faculty (the reasoning faculty). If he finds this accumulated knowledge to be insufficient for the completion of his invention, he then draws upon the sources of knowledge available to him through his creative faculty. The method by which he does this varies with the individual, but this is the essence of his procedure:

Sometimes the results are both definite and immediate. At other times, the results are negative, depending upon the state of development of the sixth sense, or creative faculty.

Hill's version of the "backburner", he calls the sixth sense. He says it's a faculty of the mind, like a muscle, that grows in utility with repetitive use. It's also like an antenna you tune so that you can receive thoughts from the "Infinite Intelligence". I think this is the same idea at its heart.

When I was thinking about this, I imagined my brain (or as I recently heard Elon Musk refer to it on Joe Rogan, my meat processor). My brain is like a processor with different areas and types of memory. What types of memory does a silicon processor have?

• RAM
• ROM
• Cache
• Instruction buffer(s)
• Speculative execution branch path cache
• Store and load buffers

In addition, the silicon processor has developed methods of accessing and transferring information from memory to memory efficiently.

I found this page very interesting: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64141366/can-a-speculatively-executed-cpu-branch-contain-opcodes-that-access-ram

Does the human mind have analogs to these types of silicon memories? Does my meat computer have all that? What is the subconscious mind? What is the analogy to the process of tapping into the infinite intelligence? Is the sixth sense equivalent to the backburner? How do I get my meat processor working as efficiently as silicon?