A torrent of silence

I usually find that the solution to a tough programming problem arrives when I'm busy with something else: doing the dishes, showering, or at my internal compiler's favorite time - while I'm falling asleep.

Here's a bit about this phenomenon from Esther de Waal's Seeking God: The Way of St Benedict:

The very act of touching, handling, feeling materal things helps to build a small barrier against the torrent of words, written and spoken, which threaten to monopolize us by insisting that they alone constitute reality. Manual work, particularly if it is solitary - gradening, crafts, for example - helps us to know ourselves for it allows the rhythms of the body to operate and gives the time and space for the unconscious to surface naturally. This is the role which Joseph Conrad was speaking about when he wrote in The Heart of Darkness, "I like what is in the work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself and not for others - what no other man can ever know."

Here's a less mystical take on encouraging the unconscious to surface, from a fellow member of an email list:

In the good old days, when I actually worked for a living and was presented with a particularly difficult engineering or programming problem, I would try to encourage that sort of thinking-without-critiquing. Usually by engaging the forebrain in some intellectually passive activity like driving our California freeways while listening to George Schell of the Cleveland Philharmonic conduct Beethoven. I would often arrive at the lab with some new notion hovering below the surface and spend a few hours not looking directly at it — so as not to scare it away until it gelled.

Unfortunately, that sort of thinking-without-critiquing often looks a lot like goofing off.