One of my favorite "moves" is to give myself a day to process an important decision by "sleeping on it". While I feel like I generally tend to move quickly on things and I like being decisive, sometimes it's important to let a situation marinate and let some background processing happen.
This background processing is important. This article from MIT makes an interesting observation:
"as we enter a dreamlike state, the prefrontal cortex of the brain, responsible for keeping impulses in check, slowly grows less active. This is when there’s a spur in theta waves that leads to an unconstrained window of consciousness; there is little censorship from the mind, allowing for visceral dreams and creative thoughts."
(Why do we dream? by Shafaq Zia)
In other words, dreaming (sleeping on it) gives your brain a unique opportunity to process thinking, unbothered by your daily guard rails.
Interesitngly, AI systems are now forming up to do something similar. From the Anthropic / Claude docs on their dreaming feature:
"Agents write to their memory stores as they work, but these writes are local and incremental: over many sessions a memory store accumulates duplicates, contradictions, and stale entries.
Dreams let Claude clean that up. A dream reads an existing memory store alongside past session transcripts, then produces a new, reorganized memory store: duplicates merged, stale or contradicted entries replaced with the latest value, and new insights surfaced."
Both are a great reminder that some of your best thinking can happen when you're not even really trying. And, the more time / opportunity you can give yourself to sleep on it, the better. Clearly, this is core component of any Slow Hunch.