Simon is writing a calculus textbook. Since there are a lot of textbooks on the market, he wants to make his distinctive by including a lot of original examples. To do this, he decides to first check what sorts of examples are in some of the other books, and then make sure to avoid those. Unfortunately, after skimming through several other books, he finds himself completely unable to think of original examples—his mind keeps returning to the examples he's just read instead of coming up with new ones.

What he's experiencing here is another aspect of priming or anchoring. The way it appears to happen in my brain is that it decides to anchor on the examples it's already seen and explore the idea-space from there, moving from an idea only to ideas that are closely related to it (similarly to a depth-first search)

At first, this search strategy might not seem so bad—in fact, it's ideal if there is one best solution and the closer you get to it the better. For example, if you were shooting arrows at a target, all you'd need to consider is how close to the center you can hit. Where we run into problems, however, is trying to come up with multiple solutions (such as multiple examples of the applications of calculus), or trying to come up with the best solution when there are many plausible solutions. In these cases, our brain's default search algorithm will often grab the first idea it can think of and try to refine it, even if what we really need is a completely different idea.