[webmaven]

> I started trying this out after puzzling about why it's unreasonably common to figure out the answer to something only moments after you get up from your desk to go ask someone else for help, even when you might have worked with it for hours. It had to have a reason, although I don't know exactly what it is!

Well you've heard the advice on looking at a problem from a different point of view, right? Usually this is intended in the sense of changing the context or reframing the problem, and it works, but takes effort because we all have our default go-to mental models. But it turns out that changing the mode of your thinking (eg. visual vs. kinesthetic, etc.) is just as helpful, and the act of trying to phrase the problem verbally is usually just different enough from just thinking about it (I believe even if you are mostly a verbal thinker) to do the same trick.

Hence "rubber duck debugging" where you solve the problem by describing it to a rubber duck rather than another human.