My working hypothesis is that we have a hierarchy of intelligence: 1. Emotional responses are the output of a policy that has been trained over the course of e

My working hypothesis is that we have a hierarchy of intelligence: 1. Emotional responses are the output of a policy that has been trained over the course of evolution. If you convinced yourself out of an emotional response, but it turns out that the emotional response was correct, then you “overthought” in that case. 2. If you have a lot of experience in a domain, your initial automatic response is the output of a highly trained and compressed policy that embodies your experience, and largely bypasses deliberative thinking. If you convince yourself out of your initial automatic response, and it turns out your automatic response was correct, then this is a case of overthinking. 3. If you are in a situation where you do not have a good automatic response, you will turn to focused thought. The set of active neurons during this focused thought might be capable of reasoning through the problem, but they also might not be. If you continue to focus without making progress, this is a case of overthinking. 4. If you cannot come to an answer via focused thought, often the solution is to stop actively thinking about it so that your brain can enter the diffused mode of thinking, where it can try activating more disparate sets of neurons to find the answer. I would probably not say that someone can over-diffuse-think, but one can wait too long. At some point, its best to start using tools, like writing, or look for the information externally, like reading.