Some random thoughts about thinking, based mostly on my own experience.

I've been playing minesweeper lately (and I've never played before). For the uninitiated, minesweeper is a game that involves using deductive reasoning (and rarely, guessing) to locate the "mines" in a grid of identical boxes. For such an abstract puzzle, it really does a good job of working the nerves, since one bad click can spoil several minutes' effort.

I was surprised to find that even when I could be logically certain about the state of a box, I felt afraid that I was incorrect (before I clicked), and (mildly) amazed when I turned out to be correct. It felt like some kind of low level psychic power or something. So it seems that our brains don't exactly "trust" deductive reasoning. Maybe because problems in the ancestral environment didn't have clean, logical solutions?

I also find that when I'm stymied by a puzzle, if I turn my attention to something else for a while, when I come back, I can easily find some way forward. The effect is stunning, an unsolvable problem becomes trivial five minutes later. I'm pretty sure there is a name for this phenomenon, but I don't know what it is. In any case, it's jarring.

Another random thought. When I'm sad about something in my life, I usually can make myself feel much better by simply saying, in a sentence, why I'm sad. I don't know why this works, but it seems to make the emotion abstract, as though it happened to somebody else.