Answer: Define the problem precisely; then hand it over to your unconscious to solve.
As most of us know from experience, if we concentrate too intensively on a tough problem, we can get stuck in a mental rut. Our thinking narrows, and we struggle vainly to come up with new ideas. But if we let the problem sit unattended for a time–if we “sleep on it”–we often return to it with a fresh perspective and a burst of creativity. Research by Ap Dijksterhuis, a Dutch psychologist who heads the Unconscious Lab at Radboud University in Nijmegen, indicates that such breaks in our attention give our unconscious mind time to grapple with a problem, bringing to bear information and cognitive processes unavailable to conscious deliberation. We usually make better decisions, his experiments reveal, if we shift our attention away from a difficult mental challenge for a time. But Dijksterhuis’s work also show that our unconscious thought processes don’t engage with a problem until we’ve clearly and consciously defined the problem. “If we don’t have a particular intellectual goal in mind, Dijksterhuis writes, “unconscious thought does not occur.” (p 119, The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr)
More thoughts from Dijksterhuis himself:
One could say that
unconscious thought is more ‘‘liberal’’ than conscious thought and leads to the generation of
items or ideas that are less obvious, less accessible and more creative. Upon being confronted with
a task that requires a certain degree of creativity, it pays off to delegate the labor of thinking to the
unconscious mind. (p 145, Where creativity resides: The generative power
of unconscious thought by Ap Dijksterhuis and Teun Meurs)
Science 311, 1005 (2006)
On Making the Right Choice: The Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect
Ap Dijksterhuis,* Maarten W. Bos, Loran F. Nordgren, Rick B. van Baaren
Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is not always advantageous to engage in thorough conscious
deliberation before choosing. On the basis of recent insights into the characteristics of conscious
and unconscious thought, we tested the hypothesis that simple choices (such as between different
towels or different sets of oven mitts) indeed produce better results after conscious thought, but
that choices in complex matters (such as between different houses or different cars) should be left
to unconscious thought. Named the ‘‘deliberation-without-attention’’ hypothesis, it was confirmed
in four studies on consumer choice, both in the laboratory as well as among actual shoppers, that
purchases of complex products were viewed more favorably when decisions had been made in the
absence of attentive deliberation.
An excellent review by Dijksterhuis et al on the superiority of the unconscious mind for making complex decisions:
