Accessing your own wisdom
Quite often the reason why we have not been able to solve a question is because we continue to apply the same approach to solving it even when that approach is not working The more we do this, the more we reinforce that approach to (unsuccessfully) solving the problem. Imagine a car driving across a muddy field and that a vehicle has already crossed leaving its own set of tyre tracks. There is a high chance that the wheels of this second car will slip into the earlier set of tracks. Once the car has slipped in, it becomes harder for them to get out of those earlier tracks. This is similar to how our brain works - it can easily slip into these already traveled (neural) paths, making it harder to step out into a new neural pathway.
Visual vs verbal
Another thing to realize is that our limbic brain is operating at roughly 10x million times faster than our conscious verbal mind. This means that as soon as we have posed a question, our brain has run through all the permutations and is already presenting us with the answers. So why aren't we able to immediately solve every challenge we face? And why is not everyone a genius, solving problems and inventing left right and centre? This is because our limbic brain communicates using visual sensory images while our conscious or logical brain is more verbally inclined. The different parts of our brain are speaking two different languages. So what we are looking for is a way to allow the visual process and pattern recognition process to communicate with as little noise as possible.
