Thinking about thoughts

Just thought about how much time do I really spend thinking, and how productive are those thoughts. As a PhD student, supposedly the people who think a lot, this came to mind while sitting down with a problem yesterday and trying to think of a solution for it. After a while (3hrs), when the problem was getting away from me, my thoughts deviated into thinking about, when did I ever think like this last time. A vague rememberance, I could recollect days from my JEE preperation, when I used to really think a lot about problems all the time. But, I guess since the day I got into a profession which really does not require you to think much, engineering, I have been drven away from that habit. Most of the modern day research is completely google oriented and its probably once in a while that you really sit back and think on problems and usually you end up solving them either within a few minutes or end up googling and finding the solution online. Well, coming to when do people think alone over problems, I can recollect some of the classic examples. I have had couple of friends who solve problems in dreams, some of them even formulate a problem before sleeping so as to get a clearer picture of the problem in their sleep and have claimed that it works!!! I like to think in shower, its probably the early morning freshness, but some of the good papers that I have published so far, have emerged as outcomes of some classic ideas under shower :) I have heard people saying that enunciating helps while thinking, tried that, works pretty well for me. My manager at Intel thinks all the time if he finds a problem, the scariest, when he's driving !! I have often thought about problems while driving, and thanks to my sub-conscious mind have so far not been invloved in any accidents. But, at the end of it a vague feeling creeps in, when I think about how unattentive I was while driving. Considering the fact that I have a junky report to write for a customer tommorrow, I think I have given sufficient thought to my thinking, and better recede back to writing my report!! But do think about it and write what you really feel!!!