[jonathanaird]

I hear this a lot and I understand people make mistakes trying to rush but this is not accurate for me. I can absolutely will myself to think faster. Maybe this comes with experience doing some meditation but when I have a difficult problem where the solution is not immediately obvious, I can sit in my chair or take a walk and focus very intensely on the problem. I get my whole mind to just focus on this one thing and I keep my mind there without getting distracted or daydreaming. I don’t try to have any kinds of thought in particular. I just focus on the problem. After doing this for a certain amount of time I will come up with my conclusion.

I could do this over a longer period of time and create much less mental strain but when I’m in a time crunch, it’s very useful.

That said if the problem is actually beyond my reach and capabilities I won’t get much of an answer.

[gridspy]

Perhaps you are not thinking faster, instead you're doing an excellent job at focusing all of your resources on one problem.

It is the sum of all your thought that is (apparently) fixed, so moving all that thought to one task will have that single task complete faster. It doesn't change how much "thought" you could do at once overall though.

[Kranar]

Then this article becomes trivial. Imagine we discussed running, no one would argue that your running speed is fixed, most people agree that one can vary the speed at which they run even though it is perfectly well understood that there is a maximum speed they can do so and a minimum speed. And just like running, the maximum speed that I can run is not a single well defined value. It depends on whether I am running a marathon or a sprint.

Similarly with thinking, I can vary the speed at which I'm thinking depending on whether I am playing bullet chess, speed chess or standard chess. Certainly when playing bullet chess, just like running a sprint, I am operating at my peak speed, but that speed is not sustainable for long periods of time and it's inefficient in terms of energy use, so I get burned out if I have to engage it for a long time.

If I'm running a marathon or thinking about a problem that requires deep and intense focus, I stop operating at my peak speed and instead operate at a long term sustainable speed.

This is the kind of variation that this article misses when it says that our thinking is fixed. It's anything but fixed, it's a fairly complex and poorly understood trade-off.

[gridspy]

Exactly. I did indeed see the article as trivial. From the actual article itself :

"If you’re a knowledge worker, you can’t pick up the pace of mental discriminations just because you’re under pressure. Chances are good that you’re already going as fast as you can. Because guess what? You can’t voluntarily slow down your thinking, either."

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Now we both know that what you say must be true. But it goes beyond anecdotal evidence. We can scan the brain with an fMRI and we see different parts of the brain light up as we think. We're not seeing thinking here - we're seeing the brain cells consume energy.

Wikipedia - "Functional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI (fMRI) measures brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow.[1][2] This technique relies on the fact that cerebral blood flow and neuronal activation are coupled. When an area of the brain is in use, blood flow to that region also increases.[3]"

If the brain was always at 100% capacity, your entire fMRI would always show complete engagement.

Like a muscle, you can overexert your brain, so like you say sustainable pace is important.

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However, if you average over days and weeks, you could say that your level of thought IS fixed at this long term sustainable level. I think that the article is considering a project that is "man-months" long and not just thinking over the course of a minute or a day.

-- Wikipedia link for fMRI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_magnetic_resonance_...