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But the more common route to a duller mind doesn’t run through neglect. It runs through competence. Every year of experience adds to your private stock of “moves” that already work — the argument that you know persuades, the fix that almost always clears the bug, the standard way to handle a difficult client. That stock is genuinely valuable. It’s also the thing that quietly makes thinking unnecessary.

You can all this tendency “running on proven moves.” This includes solving today’s problem with last year’s solution, and explaining an idea with the wording that landed last time. From the inside, this never registers as decline. It registers as getting good at things.

How This Habit Can Block Creative Problem-Solving

Psychologists have a name for the trap: the Einstellung effect. This is when the first solution that comes to mind blocks a better one from arriving.

The clearest demonstrations come from chess, where strong players shown a position containing both a famous checkmate pattern and a faster, less familiar win tend to find the famous one and stop looking for anything better. Eye-tracking shows they keep scanning the board while sincerely reporting they’re searching for alternatives — their gaze simply never leaves the squares belonging to the solution they already have.

That last part is the whole problem. Introspection doesn’t detect it. And a 2022 study published in Frontiers in Psychology suggests the narrowing isn’t something people arrive with, it builds over time. Researchers tracked where people looked while solving problems with a familiar method, and found that the split between those who’d eventually spot a better approach and those who wouldn’t wasn’t there at the start. It emerged the longer the familiar method kept working. Success is what narrows the search, and it narrows it gradually, without announcing itself.

How This Habit Can Block Understanding And Expertise

The same reflex has a verbal form, and it may be the more common of the two.

If you say something well enough, it becomes a set piece. So the next time the subject comes up, the reasoning doesn’t get rebuilt, the paragraph gets you saved gets retrieved. Repeat that for a few years and you become excellent at delivering the summary while the derivation underneath it slowly goes unmaintained.

Rozenblit and Keil called the resulting overconfidence the illusion of explanatory depth: people believe they understand things in far more mechanistic detail than they do, right up until they’re asked to explain step by step, at which point their confidence collapses.

A 2023 study published in Judgment and Decision Making found the collapse doesn’t stay contained. Across three preregistered experiments, people who attempted to explain how a zipper works came away rating their understanding of unrelated things — how snow forms, how an earthquake happens — lower too. Struggling to explain one thing seems to generalize into a broader dose of humility about how much you actually know.

Fluency feels like understanding. It’s a poor proxy for it, and it’s remarkably easy to manufacture. A 2023 study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology found that people who searched online for an explanation rated their own explanatory ability higher afterward than people who were handed the identical explanation to simply read — and merely previewing search-result snippets, without clicking through to read anything, produced almost the same inflated confidence. The polish of an answer, not the work of producing it, is what convinces us we understand.

Why Only Failure Can Dismantle This Habit

The learning literature is blunt about what builds capability: difficulty. A 2022 study published in Nature Reviews Psychology reviewing over a century of research on spacing and retrieval found that trying to pull an answer out of memory strengthens it more than rereading it ever does, and that this holds up across ages, subjects, and settings, even though the strategy runs against how learning is supposed to feel, and most learners never adopt it as a result.

Related work points the same way. A 2023 study published in Educational Psychology Review, reviewing decades of research on guessing before being taught the answer, found that this kind of errorful generation — getting it wrong first, then seeing the correct version — generally beats being told the answer up front, so long as the correct answer follows. Even sitting a test on material you haven’t studied yet appears to improve how well you learn it afterward.

The pattern is consistent enough to reframe the whole idea of mental exercise. Struggle isn’t the price of learning. It’s the whole mechanism behind it.

Which changes what the crossword advice was ever worth. A puzzle someone is already good at is mental activity, not mental growth. What seems to matter isn’t being busy, it’s being in a position to be wrong. Attempting something where the outcome is genuinely uncertain and the proven move doesn’t apply.

The Caveat Of This Habit

None of this makes proven moves the enemy. They’re what expertise is. A doctor who reasons from first principles at every appointment isn’t sharper than her colleagues; she’s slower and worse. Fluent access to what works is precisely what frees attention for what’s actually new. Rederiving everything is paralysis, not sharpness.

So the question isn’t whether to rely on stored solutions. It’s whether anything in a given week still requires not knowing. Whether there’s a room where you’re the least experienced person, a problem the usual repertoire doesn’t cover, an argument that has to be built rather than recited.

For a lot of capable people, the honest answer is no, and has been for years — not through any decision, just through the ordinary accumulation of competence.

A mind dulled by neglect at least feels dull. A mind running on proven moves feels sharp, quick and effortless, because fluency and thinking produce the same sensation from the inside — and only one of them is still doing work.

Wondering whether you’re still genuinely growing, or just getting smoother at what you already know? Find out where you land if you have this habit with science-inspired test: Growth Mindset Scale