The advice was to read a paper fully at the start of the exam, see which questions you already knew the answer to and which ones you didn't.
You then answered the questions that you knew the answer to before re-reading the others where you realised that you knew the many of the answers because your subconscious had worked it out. Rinse and repeat.
This advice stood me in good stead through many exams though obviously your subconscious couldn't help you out if you hadn't done the work In the first place.
This led me to read up on the subconscious and work out a number of ways to work with my subconscious successfully.
My favourite ones to read up and think as fully about a problem as I possibly can one day. Sleep on it and either I will find the answer comes to mind as I wake up or a soon as I start working on the problem again. Sometimes it will take several rounds of sleeps and working on the problem but I almost always arrive at an answer.
Unfortunately my mind doesn't always differentiate between a problem I need to work on (IT, personal etc.) and something that I just happened to read about. For example the other night I arrived at a theory about the reason why certain galaxies appear heavier than they are why super-massive black holes appeared much earlier than expected in the universe.
What is interesting is that I remember a chunk of the rather non-linear thought process that generated these ideas.
I woke up on Thursday morning last week and as I was waking I started thinking about the experience of a being that had lived its entire life in a closed box with no seams or windows and had no way of knowing if there was anything out side the box or if the box was the entirety of existence. I then thought that this was kind of like the experience of us within our own universe. I then went on to think about what else might enter the box to provide evidence of something outside and I realised that gravity was a good bet. Theoretically by constructing some very sensitive instruments the being inside the box could start to infer the existence of things outside the box by mapping the force and direction gravity within the box.
The first 'Aha!' moment came when I thought about the fact that gravity is thought to be so weak because it leaks out of our 4 dimensions into others and I realised that what leaks out can leak back in!
This then suggested that any unusual unexplained gravitational effects in the wider universe could be as a result of deeper structures leaking gravity back in.
I remembered the articles that I had read about dark matter and Modified Newtonian Dynamics trying to explain why there is greater mass / gravitation seen in certain galaxies than expected.
My brain then jumped to a possible explanation. The fact is that we don't know how the 4 dimensions are folded in the wider dimensions so could the gravity in the 4 dimensions be leaking back into those 4 dimensions at a distance? In effect galaxies and other structures should be mutually reinforcing their gravity as it leaks out of the 4 dimensional universe and leaks back in another place. This could explain the excess gravitational attraction seen in certain galaxies and would explain the early appearance of supermassive black holes as a feedback loop caused by matter concentrating in multiple places in the 4 dimensional universe mutually reinforcing itself across the wider dimensions causing more matter to infall.
Now as I write I'm wondering whether the bigger structures, galactic clusters and voids, are reflective of this effect.
I expect that this has already been thought of by a physicist but this is what my mind does to me some mornings!
