Re: Tricking Our Egos

[MeowChow]

I don't think I have ego tricks. When I find myself confronted with a problem that I'm unable to resolve, I just go do something else for a while, so that I'll have to re-acquaint myself with the problem when I return. Since I tend to forget things rather quickly, I'm often lucky enough to have forgetten the mistaken assumption that impaired me from solving the problem in the first place :-)

   MeowChow                                   
               s aamecha.s a..a\u$&owag.print

[davorg]

I'm sure I'm not the only one who finds that explaining the problem out loud to another programmer often gets me past blocks like this.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

"Perl makes the fun jobs fun
and the boring jobs bearable" - me

[Nooks]

I've heard this referred to as the `mannequin effect', so named because it would appear to be useful to have a mannequin on a trolley that one could simply get up, go fetch, and talk to about the problem (as opposed to bothering a presumably busy human about it).

Update: Of course, the mention was right here on PerlMonks (not Advogato as I'd previously thought). See this node, by lemming.