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Comment by blinkingled | Hacker News Reader

Good for you :) - for me, laying down with eyes shut is when I will have attractive solutions to hard problems! Happens sometimes standing in the shower but those all tend to be strategic ones unlike the tactical ones that get solved laying down.

Crazy stuff!

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Reminds me of a chapter from the book "Surely you must be joking Mr. Feynman" (as far as I remember).

The chapter describes how Feynman came across how his colleague visualizes a task. IIRC Feynman does it visually (imagines something visual in his mind) and thus can do voice related activities while he is thinking, but his colleague does it by visualizing sound (he thinks tick-tock sounds in his mind), so can do visual tasks while he is thinking.

Really fascinating how a human mind works.

Also reminds me of the quote by Einstein, something about judging the ability of a fish to climb a tree.

Everyone has a unique and effective way to navigate the world intellectually.

> Also reminds me of the quote by Einstein, something about judging the ability of a fish to climb a tree.

Almost certainly not by Einstein, for what it's worth. It was probably made up by motivational speaker Matthew Kelly or someone close to him, as the earliest verifiable occurrence of the quotation is in his 2004 book The Rhythm of Life: Living Every Day with Passion and Purpose [1].

[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/04/06/fish-climb/

I wonder if it’s derived from the feminist slogan “a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle”?

Wow. Thanks for sharing that piece of trivia! Now I get what this song from 1981 - The fish needs a bike by Blurt - was referring to. I always thought it was a reference to some surrealist work or something :)

https://www.discogs.com/Blurt-The-Fish-Needs-A-Bike/release/...

Ohh ok. Great to learn this bit of trivia. Almost everywhere I saw this quote (ahem, reddit) it is almost always associated with Einstein.

I have a heuristic: when a genius is quoted saying something that could've come from a TED talk, they probably didn't say it. Sometimes they said something kind of similar that got "sanded down" by meme evolution.

I tend to use my verbal/language capacity for analyzing problems, which makes it almost impossible for me to converse out loud at the same time.

It is from the other book by Feynman "What do you care what other people think?"

This works well for me too :) Specifically when I am going to sleep. Recently, I spent a couple of days working on "tight paving/tiles" problem from Knuth's Christmas Lecture ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxQw4CdxLr8 ) and surprised myself when I managed to exhaustively enumerate all valid arrangements(around 40 I think) for some small configuration while lying on the bed at night, something that I never thought I could do without a pen and paper.

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