Minds working on problems even when we're not consciously thinking about them

Graham and I thought it was rather a good sketch. It was therefore terribly embarrassing when I found I’d lost it. I knew Graham was going to be cross, so when I’d given up looking for it, I sat down and rewrote the whole thing from memory. It actually turned out to be easier than I’d expected.

Then I found the original sketch and, out of curiosity, checked to see how well I’d recalled it when rewriting. Weirdly, I discovered that the remembered version was actually an improvement on the one that Graham and I had written. This puzzled the hell out of me.

Again I was forced to the conclusion that my mind must have continued to think about the sketch after Graham and I had finished it. And that my mind had been improving what we’d written, without my making any conscious attempt to do so. So when I remembered it, it was already better.

Chewing this over, I realised it was like the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon: when you can’t remember a name, and you chase after it in your mind

Cleese lost a sketch, rewrote it from memory and preferred the reconstruction when the original reappeared. The story proves no secret editing process. It does expose a useful nuisance: deliberate concentration is only one state in which a problem changes.

Creative businesses distrust incubation because it cannot be distinguished visually from doing something else. Concentration looks billable. Distance looks suspicious. Yet a break after serious contact can weaken attachment to clumsy wording, allow remote associations to combine and preserve the structure that memory judged worth keeping. A naming problem abandoned overnight may return with the obvious category cliché missing. A difficult layout seen after lunch may reveal that half its elements existed only to repair the other half. The sequence matters. A first attempt, specific blockage and enough raw material give non-conscious processing something to work with. Starting from emptiness and taking a walk mainly produces exercise.

There is no guarantee that the returning idea is better. Distance can make a phrase feel fresh because criticism was absent, and memory can shorten an argument by discarding the awkward truth. Cleese had the unusual luxury of comparing both versions. In ordinary work, the recovered thought still faces the original problem, examples and constraints. Pressure creates material. Release changes what remains salient. Criticism decides whether the result improved or merely had a pleasant afternoon.