4. Just before falling asleep I generally forget what I was thinking about some seconds ago as if I can’t have a thinking thread. After this happened to me many times, I started to see a pattern: I was thinking about X and then unconsciously switched to thinking about Y (which was totally unrelated to X.) So when I was already thinking about Y, it was difficult to remember what X was about because they are unrelated. Instead, when we are awake and without external stimuli, every thought follows logically from the previous one. To see this, try to generate a random word, and observe that it is probably closely related to a previous thought. This is a limited way of thinking, and it relates to the fact that it takes time to “load things into memory.” This might explain why it doesn’t make sense to do deep thinking in chunks of 10 minutes. Indeed, when you read a paper you need a certain mindset, you take time to get there Dreams are better at this: during dreams, we accept contradictions and can jump from concept to concept. Also, just before falling asleep, my thinking is not precise. My mind refers to many concepts at the same time.

3. The consciousness is useful to push the frontier of what we know; it learns the new things. When we already learned something, the unconsciousness executes the easy things, what we already know. If something fails, the unconsciousness asks the consciousness to take control, see what’s wrong, and solve it. What the unconscious does is to automatically complete with what the consciousness have learned. For instance, when we are writing an A, we don’t think consciously about the – in the middle of the A. Probably, we aren’t even thinking consciously about the words. We are using the consciousness for the high-level tasks, except when the low-level tasks fail. So, when we try to write a Λ, we aren’t used to thinking consciously about the single letters we write. Thus, we will generally write the Λ with the – (i.e., we will write an A). Some seconds later, the conscious realizes about it. But it’s interesting, because this realization may come from the visual input of us seeing that we miswrote the Λ.

2. The time with more calm and probably more output of ideas for thinking about life is when I am doing math and subconsciously I came up with ideas about life.