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A GPS for the mind | thesephist.com

thesephist.com · 2,073 words · saved by 8 readers

When I get stuck on a really hard problem, whether it’s some impossible bug in my code or my sofa not fitting through my front door on moving day, I close my eyes and … think really hard. Somewhere behind my shut eyelids and confused eyeballs, things are happening. Electricity is flowing through the vat of brain-stuff and spindly wires that somehow make up my thought process, and for a few seconds, they just kind of do their thing. Until, if I’m lucky, an answer pops into my head a few moments later. One of my favorite questions to ponder these days has been: when I’m thinking or remembering, just in that moment when my eyes are closed and I’m sending all that extra energy to my brain, what’s really happening? There are no hard drives to spin into place in my brain. What’s taking up all that time? It’s easy to wave your hands and say “it’s just computing” or whatever, the way you expect slow computers under load to be. But often when I’m heads-down thinking, I’m not crunching numbers o

When I get stuck on a really hard problem, whether it's some impossible bug in my code or my sofa not fitting through my front door on moving day, I close my eyes and … think really hard. Somewhere behind my shut eyelids and confused eyeballs, things are happening. Electricity is flowing through the vat of brain-stuff and spindly wires that somehow make up my thought process, and for a few seconds, they just kind of do their thing. Until, if I'm lucky, an answer pops into my head a few moments later. One of my favorite questions to ponder these days has been: when I'm thinking or rememb

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