I'll check out those titles, but put simply, are you referring to how I talk to myself in many voices in the shower, having a narrative about a problem I'm picking away at?
TLDR of HBTM is that there is a nonverbal, background thread of consciousness in your mind. It has the advantage of a larger working set (short term memory) compared to the verbal, foreground thread. Therefore it can more easily integrate more complicated observations over time than your foreground thought process.
It has the disadvantage that it is non-verbal and does not work quickly, on command or under pressure. You need to give it time to work and you need a quiet, non-focused environment for it to bubble up it's conclusions. Basically, you need to study as much as you can, then go for quiet walks where you relax and don't think about the problem.
It also has the disadvantage that, because your foreground process did not do the work to understand the problem (it just got a cliff notes answer), if the problem changes, your foreground process won't be in a good position to re-integrate the knowledge it didn't work through in order to deal with the changed problem.
Rich Hickey’s talk on “Hammock driven development” talks about this too and the idea of HDD is to load the information into your mind and then... wait. Relax. Allow your subconscious mind to process it and make connections between things. Then, after an amount of time (how long and how many times you repeat this depending on the complexity of the thing and whether you feel like you have some insight yet or not) you consciously think about it again. Hence “hammock driven development”: think about your problem to load it in, then chill in a hammock for a bit.
There's a related phenomenon that I've experienced. Some of my best insights into problems have come to me when I was either very tired, drowsy, or slightly ill - like running a mild temperature. I wonder whether this is because the condition knocks out the foreground process, while not being drastic enough to knock you out fully.
Sounds a lot like the gods in "Origin of Consciousness". Occurs as well, that for those that have seen the MBTI and Jungian stuff, that the introvert/extrovert duality they posit could be described as a tortoise/talker-affinity.
The act of explaining a problem verbally to someone else forces you to be explicit about details that you gloss over when you think about the problem internally. The fun part is that you don't actually need a real person to explain to. Just going through the motions and explaining out loud to no one (or to a toy) is nearly as effective.
