Not thinking so fast can have great benefits, although you would not know this from modern educational culture. Your mind can do amazing things when it is allowed to explore, rather than just answer. This is one of the tenets I try to bring to my practice of clinical social work, and it has helped me immensely in working with computer code for online publishing.
John Cleese has an excellent piece in Edutopia on this topic:
I was a history teacher for ten years and I enjoyed it very much indeed. But today’s educational trends, which focus on specific metrics of accountability, represent a fundamental change in mind-set that demands some pretty astounding creativity on the teacher’s part.
I’ve been interested in what makes people creative ever since I started writing forty years ago. My first discovery was that I would frequently go to bed with a problem unsolved, and then find in the morning not only that the solution had mysteriously arrived, but that I couldn’t quite remember what the problem had been in the first place. Very strange.
Then I came across research done at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1970s by Donald W. MacKinnon. He had examined what made people creative, and he found that the professionals rated “most creative” by their colleagues displayed two characteristics: They had a greater facility for play, meaning they would contemplate and play with a problem out of real curiosity, not because they had to, and they were prepared to ponder the problem for much longer before resolving it. The more creative professionals had a “childish capacity” for play — childish in the sense of the total, timeless absorption that children achieve when they’re intrigued….
I strongly recommend reading the piece in its entirety at Edutopia. It is wonderful food for slow thought.
Kmareka.com 
Interesting article, Kiersten. Thanks for blogging it. In many ways, the article reinforces the feelings and perceptions that have been percolating to the surface of my consciousness, of late. As one who is firmly ensconced in “Mid-Life” (I will be 46 in a few days) and, as such, beginning to question many of my old assumptions and habits, I am coming to realize that I long for a more creative, less hectic life. But having acclimated–or been forced after a fashion to acclimate–to a relatively high rate of speed (a la the hare) on the treadmill of life, I am finding it difficult to slow things down (a la the tortoise) and am feeling tempted to just leap off the treadmill, consequences be damned. My heart is ready, but my legs haven’t quite gotten there. And, certainly, in terms of the sociocultural, political, and economic landscape in this country, one is typically dissuaded–or even prevented (e.g., by reductions in pension funding, as noted in a previous blog entry)–from taking such a leap. Overall, the prevailing attitude would appear to devalue process in favor of product, to view creativity and experience and learning as merely means to an end. What hogwash! Cleese is absolutely right. We all need to be more child-like. And, for anyone who might disagree, I say: ppppffffffttt!
Most happiest of birthdays to you, David. You’re not really 46, by the way. You get a 10 year age reduction credit for your silly punstering brain and for not giving up on the things you believe in.
Thanks, Kiersten. All I can say is: let it brain, let it brain, leftist brain. Oh, and the pun is mightier than the sword.