Otherwise we're left in a relativist position where there is no objective truth, and my eyelids start to flutter closed as I feel a philosophical discussion coming on!

"The problem is that these reports were usually made many years after the original thought processes. Picasso may simply have forgotten what prompted him to create the first ever cubist painting 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' (detail above). Perhaps if we'd asked him exactly what was going through his mind right after he painted it, the answer would have been more accurate."

You say accurate, i would just say different.
I think the problem is that we look at the memory as a storage, fixed in our mind forever so that the difficulties of remembering come from access to memory and not from the storage itself.
I would say there's no storage at all, and there's no homunculus reading an index of what is stored. Better, what we do is always to rebuild, to reinvent. And what gives us an illusion of a memory as a hardware is just our powerful brain, that support big mental models with which we can look far in the past or in the future.

I don't know if you get the point i'm trying to suggest, I cannot express myself well in english, and these are not simple topics!

Anyway, if you're interested, I suggest you to read "Complexity of the Self: A Developmental Approach to Psychopathology and Therapy" by Vittorio Guidano. You can easyly find it for few dollars on amazon.

Elsa, well done! Of course it might have been more tricky if you'd had Professor Maier wandering around the room staring at you while you tried to figure it out!

Will, great questions - all of which I now want to know the answer to!

First, is there a good reason why the details of problem-solving are inaccessible to us? Perhaps for similar reason that most of our sensory input actually goes (consciously) unnoticed - that is to say, to keep track of the problem-solving process would be far too much information for us to reasonably handle?

Second, are people who are really good at problem-solving actually more clever, or simply better at noticing and/or retaining clues? I think about TV character McGuyver - what kind of education must he have had?

Patients with neurological disorders or specific brain traumas sometimes have access to memories that have been long forgotten, and in compelling detail (cf for example, Dr. Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat). I wonder if those in similar circumstances might have better insight into how they solve problems.