Sometimes I have a terrible time making a decision. I remember when I was younger being advised to make lists of the pros and cons for each side and then somehow weigh them up and come to a conclusion, but the act of weighing them up is mysterious in the extreme, because when you’re making a difficult decision, you’re often having to consider trade-offs among things that are close to being equally desirable. Here’s some recent research that suggests that for the big decisions, the kind you tend to sweat, it can be better not to spend too much time on the conscious analysis, but to let your subconscious come to its own conclusions. Test subjects were given information about products and told they had to decide which one to purchase; spending time weighing the options led to better decisions for relatively trivial purchases like shampoo, but when people had to make big decisions, they were better off for spending some time with their conscious minds distracted while their subconscious evidently pondered all the data and made a decision. (They made better decisions in the sense that they were happier with them later.) The people needed to be aware that they were going to have to come up wth a decision in order for this to work.
This makes a lot of sense to me. I don’t know if there’s similar processing going on or not, but I’ve found that when I work for awhile on a piece of writing, if I give my mind some material to chew over and then go do something else, like take a walk or scrub the floors, I will find fresh ideas for the writing starting to come to me. Maybe this is also why names that you forget come back to you later after you stop trying to remember them. Or why I so often get NPR’s Sunday word puzzle when I’m in the shower.
