At Game Jams I would always start things off with my "2 beers, 2 coffees" method. After the theme was announced, we'd go out and discuss ideas over a few beers (just not enough to get trashed), then, come back, flesh stuff out, get our coffee and go back to work. Worked out pretty well for generating some pretty wild ideas while not making ourselves disfunctional.
Wouldn't the Ballmer Peak be pretty trashed? I don't really know how well BAC% correlates to drunkenness but that's almost double the legal limit for driving in the US.
Which at 18ml ethanol each equates to 9 UK 'units', which is about 3 and half pints or ~90% of a bottle of wine.
Of course 'trashed' or 'drunkenness' both depend on the person, and are subjective anyway, and the time taken to consume them has a big impact too - necking 4 pints is very different to a bottle over the course of a full evening, for example.
But personally no, I don't think I'd program very well in either case.
Personally, weed might help in the creative phase of problem solving, but if it requires working memory weed is a big negative(at least how it affects me)
I find it's great for diving into refactoring projects that I've been putting off. I like to do that stoned because it's usually not that hard, just tedious moving files around and organizing things. Same way my wife reorganizes the furniture when she gets stoned.
I also sometimes find solutions to hard problems in my head when stoned, though I usually just write down the solution rather than coding it, as large-scale implementations are better done sober.
Yeah, a former colleague of mine told me they used to regularly drink a pint of beer with an evening of coding, until on one occasion they introduced a subtle bug which took them two days to hunt down.
They were working in C, which makes it a lot easier to introduce subtle bugs than most languages, but I certainly think twice about coding while under the influence since I heard that story!
I remember reading writing advice somewhere (prose, not code) that suggested you have an alcoholic beverage in the evening for your rough drafts, and then coffee in the morning for your editing. The strategy was: loosen up and then tighten up.
It's a pretty poor study, to be honest. The pattern I tend to see on Hacker News with studies is that they go unread beyond the abstract (often not even that when a press release is linked, like here) and people just chime in with their anecdotes that confirm their own personal beliefs.
I can't really determine what the right cost/benefit trade-off here. Reading beyond the abstract is rather time consuming and is not something I can afford for every paper.
What exactly is the point of these kinds of smartass comments? Even if it were within the realm of common knowledge (which I find debatable), having a study to confirm it could still have value.
I personally didn't know that caffeine might be a problem for creativity, so I found the article interesting.
Perhaps you were unemployed as well. I had (have, actually) a job, but due to absolutely hilarious (in hindsight of course) circumstances had to spend most of my money on a room I got via AirBnB.
Pressure of any kind is my best motivator as well. A serious deadline to hit with significant consequences (the consequences don't even have to be mine necessarily) often gets the best work out of me.
Is there any scientific evidence? It could be that microdosers are subconsciously thinking, "I want to be more creative today," when they decide to do the drugs. Any creativity after that point would be a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Cannabis, although I find it's easy to accidentally dive deep on something I didn't mean to on it -- I find combining it with coffee prevents me from getting too focused on one thing. YMMV.
I'm no artist, but I've always felt creativity comes from dysfunction/chaos.
My wife (a psychologist) and I discuss this regularly around poetry, music, painting, etc. Some of the most "beautiful" works come from unhealthy emotional states. And that a lot of the sameness we get today in popular culture arises when art is cultivated by large organizations which are inherently are devoid of emotion, and are pushing populism instead of beauty.
You can see it very easily today in popular music. If you look back to the 1990s and the rise of alternative music, hundreds of one-hit-wonders, 8 different "Natalie"s, etc. And today where one-hit-wonders don't really exist anymore because Clear Channel has cultivated a sound and artists that don't conform that sound are not going to get airplay, and not have a run-away one-hit-wonder and fade back into obscurity and cult-fandom.
Yeah that's for most divergent thinking. In the art realm here's an example of Penny Arcade's Tycho talking about anti depressants and the usual lack of creativity that comes with them. https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/01/09/bedeviled
Linkin Park's Bennington Talked numerous times about how his drug addictions helped him creatively despite him wanting to be sober. His later more sober songs kinds suck tbh.
The thoughts that come from drug tweaked brains are always slightly off. Sometimes though not usually, the thoughts are unique in a novel and attractive way. For creative thinking, dosing on something may be effective but I doubt it's healthy.
We have to be careful about romanticizing mental illness though. As a professional illustrator, I’ve seen more people spiral out of the field from mental illness than succeed because of some visionary ability that illness provided them.
There are of course brilliant artists who are nuts, many of whose work I admire. But most high-performing people I know seem to be pretty “normal” and disciplined.
I tend to agree, for me the music died sometime around 2000 with the post-90s hangover of facing "reality" with 9/11 and consolidation of radio station ownership. In my city, we simply don't have any real radio stations. The only play top 40 and a pittance of alternative music, mostly from over 20 years ago.
Meanwhile, my Discover Weekly in Spotify and the channels spun from those artists have many thousands of songs that are considerably better than anything on the radio, but will never get airtime.
Here's a good example of what a real radio station would sound like today if we still had DJs and the freedom to play anything:
I asked Bill (the owner) 13 years ago about opening a station in my town to simply play his stream on FM but he broke the news to me that it's not really possible. It would cost something like $100,000 dollars (probably $250,000 today) just to get the license.
I also got the feeling that it would be so expensive to operate (in electricity alone) that stations are no longer viable as self-sustaining entities. They make their money by cross-promotion of other stations and businesses under an umbrella corporation.
The only way to break up this stagnation is antitrust enforcement IMHO. Bring back the Broadcast Station Cross-Ownership Rule at the very least, then go further to also break up the big media duopolies like CNN/Fox News (which of course will not happen in these times):
In 2017, the Commission eliminated PDF Download its rule that had previously prohibited common ownership of a full-power broadcast station and a daily newspaper if the station's contour (defined separately by type of station) completely encompassed the newspaper's city of publication and the station and newspaper were in the same relevant Nielsen market. At the same time, the Commission also eliminated the radio-television cross-ownership rule, which had restricted the common ownership of broadcast radio and television stations located in the same market. These two rules -- the newspaper-broadcast cross ownership and radio-television cross ownership rules -- were eliminated due in part to the growth in the number and variety of sources of entertainment, news and information in the modern media marketplace.
...and that's why modern pop music is such boring formulaic stuff. The only interesting life I can discern exists only in underground-ish electronic music.
For me, anything that makes me a little tired so my thoughts wander. Sitting down after a hard workout for example. Another is that time at the end of the day where I worked hard so I'm a bit tired, but I'm not so tired that it's time to sleep yet. I also have to allow it to happen. Sitting down in front of the PS4 or on my phone is not going to let my mind wander.
I recall from someone in the field in art therapy who discussed with me the difference between being artistic and being creative. Being an artist implies the pursuit of technical mastery of a certain craft, whereas being creative is the ability to create novel ideas through various means. These certainly aren't mutually exclusive properties, as many of the legendary artists of the past are those who excelled in both.
Though it can feel discouraging to perceive that one lacks a natural affinity for either of these qualities (I tend to fall more into the creative side of things rather than artistic), this also gives rise to the long list of successful artistic/creative duos. For example, duos are pretty common in the webcomic community (Penny Arcade being the most obvious example).
It's good to strive to improve oneself, but should the right opportunity arise, working together with other people who can make up for those (perceived) shortcomings has at least as much potential as being a solo artist/creative. And being involved with a community can provide new insights which can lead to personal growth in creativity and mastery.
I completely agree with your distinction, but I'd subdivide things on another level too. Being artistic is about craft, but it's also about expression.
There is something floating around in your mind that you want others to experience. It might be an emotion or thought or aesthetic experience that you had and want others to share. It can even be "asymmetrical" in the sense that perhaps you yourself haven't had the experience but it's one you want someone else to have.
Craft is all about the "how" of art, and expression is about the "what" and the "why". Expression can be a way of connecting with people because what you feel or think becomes something they feel or think too.
If you have art that is all craft and no expression, it can be a little empty or dull. For example, a pianist who plays all the right notes but doesn't put any feeling into it. Art with all expression and no craft isn't always great either. If a painter wants to capture the beauty of a person's face but can't draw noses, the effect probably won't be beauty.
Hold a key in one of your hands and hang your hand down by your side while you let yourself fall asleep while sitting in a chair (honestly this first part sounds the most difficult).
When you fall asleep—or rather the trance-like borderlands between awake and sleep— you should naturally drop the key (or whatever metallic, noise-making object) which should spring you back awake retaining some of that state you just fell into, or any insights sprung into mind during that state.
I'm sure everyone's had mornings where they woke up after dreaming but without feeling quite awake—it's related to that feeling that they'd chase.
Maybe someone has a link on hand to a better write-up about it. I don't.
Didn't Benjamin Franklin sleep at his desk with a stick propped under his elbow, so when the stick fell out he would invent stuff? I remember hearing that somewhere but now I can't find it
I would be willing to try this if it didn't take me 20 minutes to fall asleep, probably even longer if I had to do it on a chair in the middle of the day.
A long time ago in a gifted kid program, I was taught a method which I like. Just now I learned it's apparently just brainstorming, but specifically the original Osborn method (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorming#Osborn's_method).
The gist (as I was taught it) is that when generating ideas, you separate things into two phases.
In the first phase, you focus solely on coming up with a lot of ideas. And here's the key part: during this phase, you avoid all judgment, evaluation, and negative thinking (maybe even excessive positive thinking) about ideas. If you're trying to generate ideas that solve a problem, for example, you don't worry about whether it will work. Just write it down.
In the second phase, you then go through and evaluate which ideas are good and bad. Many of them won't make sense, and of course you toss those out, but it's good that they're on the list because it confirms you did it right.
I think doing it this way this gains you two things. One, in the first phase, you stay focused on idea generation. Every moment your brain is occupied in evaluating merits is a moment your brain is not working on creating ideas. It's very easy to get sidetracked exploring an idea in depth. Avoiding evaluation helps ensure you actually allocate time to idea generation.
Two, it helps emotionally. Judgment, even if done constructively and in good faith, tends to kill the moment/mood (which is relatively fragile), whether it is self-judgment or from others. Coming up with ideas feels good and you get a little emotional reward as you create them. But negative thoughts or responses tend to make you want to hold back. Last time you offered (to yourself or someone else) an idea, it was partly a negative experience, so why repeat that?
You can do the two-phase thing individually in your own head or in groups.
Practically speaking, this isn't necessarily easy to do in groups. Many people already have preconceived notions about how brainstorming or idea generation is supposed to work, and it's hard to get them to try a new way or understand the difference between this and how they normally do it. Also, some people have trouble sticking to it. Sometimes because of impatience or wanting to look smart, but also because evaluating later can give you a feeling that you'll forget an important thought if you don't express it now.
Anecdotally, I was recently cramming a lot of "Leetcode medium" questions to prepare for job interviews, and after a couple of weeks, I was drinking Starbuck's coffee and solving those problems like a machine... seriously, like a machine.
I found I did get better (or at least much faster) at recognizing subproblems and quickly composing an overall solution, even if none of the steps was particularly creative.
After about 3 weeks I had to ditch the coffee, I was getting too addled.
(Not a controlled experiment, of course, just conveying my impression of the experience).
Another anecdote, but when prepping for any sort of competition I used to be a hard-core caffeine consumer (measurable in grams, instead of mg) and it sometimes led to some weird effects.
After a day or two of that level of caffeine intake, I go into an almost trance of productivity and performance. It feels like I'm watching myself do what I need to do, not that I have to 'do it' myself. It's a very strange sensation. It's the same sensation I get when I'm 'in the zone' and competing in something with 100% of my focus on it (emotionally engaged, you might say).
I don't get into that state anywhere close to as easy without caffeine. I've been off caffeine for about 4-5 months now and I've noticed a change. My productivity isn't worse in any measurable way, but it feels different. I wish I could describe it in more relatable terms but I have nothing I can really relate it to.
I know exactly what you mean. My theory is that getting amped up on caffeine keeps you from getting decent sleep, which means your cortisol/whatever hormones are still kinda high when you wake up, so when you take even more caffeine upon awakening, your body seems to move forwards from a different baseline than when you drink coffee after completely resting. This along with the fact that for me personally, being tired makes me more focused in a very one dimensional way, i can be very immersed in what im doing without ever really questioning if what im doing is even worth doing in the first place.
I think there's a kind of 'loading' period where your body absorbs caffeine and normalizes into a caffeinated state. I don't know if the sleep cycle has much to do with it though. In my case, I sleep much better after I have caffeine. I've been sleeping poorly for several months now because of my decision to cut it out.
I might be abnormal (people I live and work with certainly think so!), but I basically never feel 'tired.' I go from feeling 100% to "I need to sleep." This has remained true even after I cut out caffeine, so I can't really relate to how you describe working while tired.
Definitely not a healthy habit, but I used to take an energy drink to bed at night because without the caffeine it would take forever to fall asleep. I'd believed it was an addiction, except now I have been 'clean' of caffeine for so long (without any urges to consume it) and still suffer the same difficulty of falling asleep.
If I drink coffee I definitely notice a need to clear the bowels more often (probably twice a day). Energy drinks and caffeine tablets don't have that effect on me, so once a day works fine.
The only negative thing is that I often work until right before I need to sleep, so if I'm drinking something mindlessly while working I end up waking up in the night once.
I wish I could experiment with it like you, but the risk that it'll send me into an anxiety episode that feels like a heart attack/food poisoning combo and which begins in the middle of the night in a sweat-soaked bed and leads with waking up in a colder, harder bed (the floor) because you passed out when you got out of bed because the blood pressure drop to your brain was too intense because your heart was beating too fast to pump blood quickly enough to adjust and continues with at least one day of zombified, ambient nausea and terror is just too high for it to possibly be worth it.
(Cacao did this to me, btw, after I consumed a ton of it one time. Theobromine -- scuffed caffeine; caffeine without a methyl group that hardly passes the blood-brain barrier! I don't want to think about how that much ACTUAL caffeine would feel...)
For me there was a optimal caffeine intake for peak leet code problem solving, the biggest thing is that coffee makes me perform better but if that disturbs my sleep that day, then the next day more coffee would make me more wired but much slower at problem solving. So peak leetcode for me is good sleep and adequate caffeine but not too much that it destroys sleep.
>In the paper, Zabelina differentiates “convergent” from “divergent” thinking. The former is defined as seeking a specific solution to a problem, for example, the “correct” answer. The latter is characterized by idea generation where a large set of apt, novel or interesting responses would be suitable. Caffeine was shown to improve convergent thinking in the study, while consuming it had no significant impact on divergent thinking.
Yeah, this was a bit was odd. IMO, problem solving begins with 'divergent' thinking and only later converges toward a, or the, solution. A study like this hinges upon how variables like'divergent thinking' were quantified, and there were no examples given of how they tested for either style of thinking here.
I think focusing your mind is like focusing a magnifying glass, you can go broad, or narrow, but not both. How far do you go down a path till you switch and try another? I think stimulants increase how far you'll remain engaged on one idea. Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathfinding
As a graphic designer my advice for people looking to convert a stimulant into divergent thinking fuel is building yourself a framework for developing creative ideas. Not exactly rocket science, but I do see where this article is coming from.
Lots of thumbnail drawings and constructive criticism from a teammate is the meat of it.
Also... be naturally good at divergent thinking I guess? I love working with people who are naturally divergent. They tell the funniest jokes.
It’s the different caffeine dose plus all the other chemicals. L-theanine in green tea, for example. I think I’ve seen some research on the difference between green tea and coffee somewhere.
The study measures the effects of regular caffeine users:
> Participants were invited to participate if they were between 18-35 years of age, consumed between 1-2 cups of caffeinated beverages per day at least 5 days a week, did not smoke, were native English speakers, and took no psychiatric medications or painkillers on a regular basis.
> [...]
> Participants were asked to abstain from any caffeinated or alcoholic beverages from 4 pm on the day prior to the session.
I recently listened to Michael Pollan's Caffeine [0], which was on Audible's free monthly audiobook list recently. He argues (and I'm inclined to agree) that if you are a daily caffeine consumer, your daily cup of coffee does less in the way of cognitive enhancement, and more in the way of getting you back to your baseline (i.e. preventing caffeine withdrawal).
With this in mind, I think the study could be improved by having subjects who started off completely off caffeine for a few weeks. That way, we'd be more certain that the control group isn't going through caffeine withdrawal, and that the effect of caffeine isn't decreased by tolerance.
> Typically, the onset of symptoms starts 12 to 24 hours after caffeine cessation, peaks at 20–51 hours, and may last up to two to nine days.
> The severity of symptoms vary from individual to individual, and most commonly include a headache, fatigue, decreased energy/activeness, decreased alertness, drowsiness, decreased contentedness, depressed mood, difficulty concentrating, irritability, and feeling foggy/not clearheaded
> The incidence or severity of symptoms increased with increases in the daily dose, but abstinence from low doses, such as about one small cup of coffee per day, also produced symptoms of withdrawal.
I've been doing 'days off' off coffee amd I'm inclined to sleep waaaay more. Like from 8 hours to 14. It can be a massive trade off in productivity. I have to set aside light workloads for those days.
Of course this is anecdotal and should be taken as such. But I can completely get on board with Pollan's assertion. If I stop caffeine consumption for a few weeks. The day I go back on, even a single coffee puts me into a "oh wow where have you been all my life?!" energized mood of getting stuff done.
This would be a big improvement to the study. As part of preparation for the WoW Classic launch I and the rest of my leveling group quit caffeine for 2 weeks to help reset our tolerance. In order to play as effectively as possible we delayed using caffeine for as long we possible in our sessions so we could play longer. Being used to consuming caffeine on a daily basis it was amazing to see the difference in its effectiveness using that method.
I'm in touch with the dose because I tend to nibble pills. It's weird to me how often people consume caffeine uncritically, skipping days, having arbitrary massive doses, etc. I'm clean right now, but if I were going to start up again, 66-100mg would be all I needed to be flying. The 200mg in the study is odd to me, because that kind of dose only makes sense for someone who is already chemically dependent.
Cold turkey is the only effective way I've found to lower my dose. My personal caffeine withdrawal timeline is about 4-5 weeks (starting from say 400-500mg/day). The first few days are bad, the next few days are better. The second week is terrible. The third week is worse. Then it slowly gets better.
I think the issue is how you'd find enough people sufficiently "clean" that 66mg-100mg would be a big dose. Most people don't keep track of their caffeine ingestion at all, but downs big cups of coffee at uncontrolled intervals.
For my part withdrawal from going cold turkey is absolute hell unless I'm travelling or otherwise majorly changing my routine. Like with many other drugs, despite the severe physical effects, caffeine withdrawal is very dependent on mental state as well. I always tends to minimize or totally stop my caffeine intake when I go on holiday or visit family etc, and I don't notice any of the normal withdrawal effects.
If I for whatever reason want to "reset" outside of travel, I'll try to step down, and pre-emptively take a paracetamol/acetaminophen early evening because I tend to start getting shakes in the evening if I reduce my caffeine intake too quickly. Cold turkey is too brutal for me.
People don't seem to realise just how much caffeine can affect them. It can be incredibly useful, but like you I find it weird that people consume it ad hoc without carefully managing the doses. I suspect a lot of people spend a lot of time miserable without realising why because of it.
I was under the impression that on average the brain/body needs around 9 days of no caffeine consumption to get back to its natural baseline. I can't seem to find the source of that study right now...
You could do the math if you look up the half-life of caffeine. Via a quick Google search it looks like it is 4-6 hours. So if I understand it correctly, it's 4-6 hours for 100mg to become 50mg, then another 4-6 for 50mg to become 25mg, etc. So like if all you did was have a single cup of 100mg coffee, then its like 12-18 hours for it to go away. If you're me though, you drink like 3-4 a day. This seems to be about 28 to 42 hours. Withdrawals could take up to 2 weeks in my experience, and are proportional to how heavy my intake was.
That tells you how long before it's out of your system, not how long it takes to reset after.
Effect duration for a psychoactive is related to half-life, but they aren't identical, and 'reset time' varies widely, e.g. MDMA is over in about 4 hours but it takes at minimum of two weeks before one can get a comparable effect again.
I had a couple of teachers who were ridiculous sticklers about this in highschool. My hack is remembering the two phrases Affect A change vs cause and effect.
I can tell you this from personal experience. I can do activities with which I'm already familiar quicker, but I am far less creative due to the caffeine anxiety.
So do the ADHD meds I take; huge gains in problem solving and execution, not so much in the creativity front. I wonder if this is a general psychological feature of stimulants
I tend to agree that's a reasonable broad conclusion.
However, even among stimulants, there are chemical differences between them, and they might act differently in the body. Also, coffee does contain a lot of other chemicals alongside the caffeine. Biology is never simple!
However, you can, in my experience, enhance the creative/lateral-thinking benefits of sleep cycles by adding carefully-timed/dosed caffeine as a stimulant. The basic kinds of patterns I've found to work well go something like: Bang your head on a hard problem to at least partial mental exhaustion, then consume coffee and go take a short nap. The stimulant buzz will slow down the process of falling asleep from exhaustion, and that slowed-down timeline gives you more minutes in that halfway-asleep state with your mind abuzz in lateral creative connections mode. Then you eventually make it into sleep and wake up later refreshed with new ideas.
For me, caffeine is "focus juice". Makes it possible to care about solving tedious work problems. I can see how the same would apply to writers and artists, who have tons of creative ideas but have a harder time battling through the "war of art" without a little help from our friend Coffea arabica.
Creativity tends to flow best standing in the shower, lying in bed, or out for a run or a bike ride.
Creativity can really only happen when the mind isn't doing anything in particular. Only then can it wander, and only in wandering can it arrive at novel combinations or alterations of ideas.
For me, its being relaxed but not necessarily tired. I tend to get a second wind after dinner, at a time when there is no pressure just my personal interest, and I'm more creative during that time.
On a side note, I really enjoy the taste of coffee. I try not to drink more than one cup a day, but I wonder now about what would happen if I stopped cold turkey.
Maybe a couple days reset wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
I usually take coffee tolerance breaks, 3 days withdrawal symptoms like headache and 20 days coffee-free, when I come back, it hits better than if I were stayed so it is rewarding.
I find weaning off with following a gradual path of half-caf -> decaf* or black tea -> herbal tea helps greatly with withdrawal symptoms. Then staying off caffeine for a few weeks really brings the rush back when I inevitably resume drinking coffee
*I should point out that decaf still has a little caffeine in it
I drink a cup of coffee in the morning, maybe have a green tea in the afternoon. I've gone off caffeine and the only negative impact is I just take a little longer to wake up. I am sure everyone's tolerance is different, but I think I would need to start drinking more coffee to feel any kind of withdrawal affects.
I guess I never assumed it did. For me, the experience of caffeine is more or less that it just wakes up my brain. Whatever type of thinking I was already capable of or inclined toward when my brain is engaged, it just enables me to actually do it.
It is nice to have a more scientific basis to back that up, though.
> Coffee is a great power in my life; I have observed its effects on an epic scale. Coffee roasts your insides. Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring.
Then again I'm sure there are plenty of SV hipster types who might be big on it. "forget microdosing, khat is the new path to rockstar programming flow states"
No, I think it's a bit ridiculous to assume that everyone would be microdosing or that it provides such a massive competitive edge such that the drawbacks of microdosing are outweighed.
Too much personal introspection and autobiographical thinking. Tangential thoughts not relevant to the task at hand. Lack of linear focus. That kind of thing.
I bet people are just a little more weird microdosing psychedelics. Like, come on if it impacts your ability to create novel things, then you are going to create novel conversation topics and some of those are going to be fucking weird. I love acid for personal development but I am not sure if I could handle this reality.
Microdosing is mostly hype. I know many people who've tried microdosing. Does it give you a 5% edge? Maybe... but sometimes it distracts and subtracts 5%.
It is not NZT from the movie Limitless, despite media hype.
As a productivity drug, amphetamines far outclass psychedelics.
If you mean the substituted amphetamines which have serotonergic activity (DOB and such) then sure, amphetamines and psychedelics aren't mutually exclusive, but those are very rare drugs especially in the modern day.
“The 200mg enhanced problem solving significantly, but had no effect on creative thinking,” said Zabelina. “It also didn’t make it worse, so keep drinking your coffee; it won’t interfere with these abilities.”
Balzac famously (apocryphally, perhaps?) known for drinking 50 cups of coffee a day!
This part resonated with me:
> When you have reached the point of consuming this kind of coffee, then become exhausted and decide that you really must have more, even though you make it of the finest ingredients and take it perfectly fresh, you will fall into horrible sweats, suffer feebleness of the nerves, and undergo episodes of severe drowsiness.
I definitely get extremely drowsy any time after 5 pm when I have gotten into the habit of drinking plenty of coffee per day
Looking at Table 3, it seems like there is a consistent improvement in divergent problem solving, but it's well within the standard deviation for each row. So it may actually help with that and we just need many more data points.
The other thing is, for me caffeine results in more ideas bubbling out of my subconscious. This can be great for brainstorming-type creativity or getting unstuck while working on a creative project - but it's like operations research where you're solving the problem by adding another variable. It's not useful for more specific, constrained problems like the "divergent" tasks in the paper.
Has an interesting side effect of screwing with threshold of movement, particularly finger movement.
I play rhythm games (sifac, llsif, deresute, mirishita...) regularly and tried modafinil. My fingers wouldn't auto-move anymore, and furthermore even if I moved them consciously, it took more effort to do so.
At everything else, it puts caffeine to shame, with no tolerance buildup or withdrawal symptoms.
For creativity, get used to running a fan nearby. If you're like me, your inbuilt pattern-matcher will autocomplete and drag up 'ghost impressions' while you're otherwise occupied. A fan is better than an electronic noise source because its air, and thus its sound, interacts with the surrounding world; instead of being a point-source, it's a better background.
For problem solving, dwell on the problem in its domain just before bedtime, and make sure it's the last thing on your mind as you settle down into sleep. Let the subconscious have sole access to your understanding of the problem overnight.
Everybody's built different, but these work for me.
I wonder how they establish a control group. Most people regularly consume caffeine, so this is most likely measuring the effects of caffeine withdrawal, since the control isn't necessarily people who never consume caffeine. I guess you could test on Mormons for this.
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[ 269 ms ] story [ 5993 ms ] threadDrink responsibly.
But enough to reach the Ballmer Peak? https://xkcd.com/323/
Which at 18ml ethanol each equates to 9 UK 'units', which is about 3 and half pints or ~90% of a bottle of wine.
Of course 'trashed' or 'drunkenness' both depend on the person, and are subjective anyway, and the time taken to consume them has a big impact too - necking 4 pints is very different to a bottle over the course of a full evening, for example.
But personally no, I don't think I'd program very well in either case.
Caffeine-code is much easier to follow later.
I also sometimes find solutions to hard problems in my head when stoned, though I usually just write down the solution rather than coding it, as large-scale implementations are better done sober.
They were working in C, which makes it a lot easier to introduce subtle bugs than most languages, but I certainly think twice about coding while under the influence since I heard that story!
I can make plenty of those.. and I've never had beer.
I can't really determine what the right cost/benefit trade-off here. Reading beyond the abstract is rather time consuming and is not something I can afford for every paper.
I personally didn't know that caffeine might be a problem for creativity, so I found the article interesting.
I sometimes used alcohol for song writing purposes. Are there healthier methods?
I even started a technical blog:
https://wringing.it/
But I may not be poor enough anymore to continue writing it.
BTW any interesting tech talks, meetups etc. you can recommend?
My wife (a psychologist) and I discuss this regularly around poetry, music, painting, etc. Some of the most "beautiful" works come from unhealthy emotional states. And that a lot of the sameness we get today in popular culture arises when art is cultivated by large organizations which are inherently are devoid of emotion, and are pushing populism instead of beauty.
You can see it very easily today in popular music. If you look back to the 1990s and the rise of alternative music, hundreds of one-hit-wonders, 8 different "Natalie"s, etc. And today where one-hit-wonders don't really exist anymore because Clear Channel has cultivated a sound and artists that don't conform that sound are not going to get airplay, and not have a run-away one-hit-wonder and fade back into obscurity and cult-fandom.
Linkin Park's Bennington Talked numerous times about how his drug addictions helped him creatively despite him wanting to be sober. His later more sober songs kinds suck tbh.
The thoughts that come from drug tweaked brains are always slightly off. Sometimes though not usually, the thoughts are unique in a novel and attractive way. For creative thinking, dosing on something may be effective but I doubt it's healthy.
There are of course brilliant artists who are nuts, many of whose work I admire. But most high-performing people I know seem to be pretty “normal” and disciplined.
Meanwhile, my Discover Weekly in Spotify and the channels spun from those artists have many thousands of songs that are considerably better than anything on the radio, but will never get airtime.
Here's a good example of what a real radio station would sound like today if we still had DJs and the freedom to play anything:
https://radioparadise.com/player
I asked Bill (the owner) 13 years ago about opening a station in my town to simply play his stream on FM but he broke the news to me that it's not really possible. It would cost something like $100,000 dollars (probably $250,000 today) just to get the license.
I also got the feeling that it would be so expensive to operate (in electricity alone) that stations are no longer viable as self-sustaining entities. They make their money by cross-promotion of other stations and businesses under an umbrella corporation.
The only way to break up this stagnation is antitrust enforcement IMHO. Bring back the Broadcast Station Cross-Ownership Rule at the very least, then go further to also break up the big media duopolies like CNN/Fox News (which of course will not happen in these times):
https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/fccs-review-broadcast-o...
In 2017, the Commission eliminated PDF Download its rule that had previously prohibited common ownership of a full-power broadcast station and a daily newspaper if the station's contour (defined separately by type of station) completely encompassed the newspaper's city of publication and the station and newspaper were in the same relevant Nielsen market. At the same time, the Commission also eliminated the radio-television cross-ownership rule, which had restricted the common ownership of broadcast radio and television stations located in the same market. These two rules -- the newspaper-broadcast cross ownership and radio-television cross ownership rules -- were eliminated due in part to the growth in the number and variety of sources of entertainment, news and information in the modern media marketplace.
For me, anything that makes me a little tired so my thoughts wander. Sitting down after a hard workout for example. Another is that time at the end of the day where I worked hard so I'm a bit tired, but I'm not so tired that it's time to sleep yet. I also have to allow it to happen. Sitting down in front of the PS4 or on my phone is not going to let my mind wander.
I recall from someone in the field in art therapy who discussed with me the difference between being artistic and being creative. Being an artist implies the pursuit of technical mastery of a certain craft, whereas being creative is the ability to create novel ideas through various means. These certainly aren't mutually exclusive properties, as many of the legendary artists of the past are those who excelled in both.
Though it can feel discouraging to perceive that one lacks a natural affinity for either of these qualities (I tend to fall more into the creative side of things rather than artistic), this also gives rise to the long list of successful artistic/creative duos. For example, duos are pretty common in the webcomic community (Penny Arcade being the most obvious example).
It's good to strive to improve oneself, but should the right opportunity arise, working together with other people who can make up for those (perceived) shortcomings has at least as much potential as being a solo artist/creative. And being involved with a community can provide new insights which can lead to personal growth in creativity and mastery.
There is something floating around in your mind that you want others to experience. It might be an emotion or thought or aesthetic experience that you had and want others to share. It can even be "asymmetrical" in the sense that perhaps you yourself haven't had the experience but it's one you want someone else to have.
Craft is all about the "how" of art, and expression is about the "what" and the "why". Expression can be a way of connecting with people because what you feel or think becomes something they feel or think too.
If you have art that is all craft and no expression, it can be a little empty or dull. For example, a pianist who plays all the right notes but doesn't put any feeling into it. Art with all expression and no craft isn't always great either. If a painter wants to capture the beauty of a person's face but can't draw noses, the effect probably won't be beauty.
Hold a key in one of your hands and hang your hand down by your side while you let yourself fall asleep while sitting in a chair (honestly this first part sounds the most difficult).
When you fall asleep—or rather the trance-like borderlands between awake and sleep— you should naturally drop the key (or whatever metallic, noise-making object) which should spring you back awake retaining some of that state you just fell into, or any insights sprung into mind during that state.
I'm sure everyone's had mornings where they woke up after dreaming but without feeling quite awake—it's related to that feeling that they'd chase.
Maybe someone has a link on hand to a better write-up about it. I don't.
The gist (as I was taught it) is that when generating ideas, you separate things into two phases.
In the first phase, you focus solely on coming up with a lot of ideas. And here's the key part: during this phase, you avoid all judgment, evaluation, and negative thinking (maybe even excessive positive thinking) about ideas. If you're trying to generate ideas that solve a problem, for example, you don't worry about whether it will work. Just write it down.
In the second phase, you then go through and evaluate which ideas are good and bad. Many of them won't make sense, and of course you toss those out, but it's good that they're on the list because it confirms you did it right.
I think doing it this way this gains you two things. One, in the first phase, you stay focused on idea generation. Every moment your brain is occupied in evaluating merits is a moment your brain is not working on creating ideas. It's very easy to get sidetracked exploring an idea in depth. Avoiding evaluation helps ensure you actually allocate time to idea generation.
Two, it helps emotionally. Judgment, even if done constructively and in good faith, tends to kill the moment/mood (which is relatively fragile), whether it is self-judgment or from others. Coming up with ideas feels good and you get a little emotional reward as you create them. But negative thoughts or responses tend to make you want to hold back. Last time you offered (to yourself or someone else) an idea, it was partly a negative experience, so why repeat that?
You can do the two-phase thing individually in your own head or in groups.
Practically speaking, this isn't necessarily easy to do in groups. Many people already have preconceived notions about how brainstorming or idea generation is supposed to work, and it's hard to get them to try a new way or understand the difference between this and how they normally do it. Also, some people have trouble sticking to it. Sometimes because of impatience or wanting to look smart, but also because evaluating later can give you a feeling that you'll forget an important thought if you don't express it now.
If the solution was obvious, where's the problem?
I found I did get better (or at least much faster) at recognizing subproblems and quickly composing an overall solution, even if none of the steps was particularly creative.
After about 3 weeks I had to ditch the coffee, I was getting too addled.
(Not a controlled experiment, of course, just conveying my impression of the experience).
After a day or two of that level of caffeine intake, I go into an almost trance of productivity and performance. It feels like I'm watching myself do what I need to do, not that I have to 'do it' myself. It's a very strange sensation. It's the same sensation I get when I'm 'in the zone' and competing in something with 100% of my focus on it (emotionally engaged, you might say).
I don't get into that state anywhere close to as easy without caffeine. I've been off caffeine for about 4-5 months now and I've noticed a change. My productivity isn't worse in any measurable way, but it feels different. I wish I could describe it in more relatable terms but I have nothing I can really relate it to.
I might be abnormal (people I live and work with certainly think so!), but I basically never feel 'tired.' I go from feeling 100% to "I need to sleep." This has remained true even after I cut out caffeine, so I can't really relate to how you describe working while tired.
The only negative thing is that I often work until right before I need to sleep, so if I'm drinking something mindlessly while working I end up waking up in the night once.
(Cacao did this to me, btw, after I consumed a ton of it one time. Theobromine -- scuffed caffeine; caffeine without a methyl group that hardly passes the blood-brain barrier! I don't want to think about how that much ACTUAL caffeine would feel...)
Yeah, this was a bit was odd. IMO, problem solving begins with 'divergent' thinking and only later converges toward a, or the, solution. A study like this hinges upon how variables like'divergent thinking' were quantified, and there were no examples given of how they tested for either style of thinking here.
Lots of thumbnail drawings and constructive criticism from a teammate is the meat of it.
Also... be naturally good at divergent thinking I guess? I love working with people who are naturally divergent. They tell the funniest jokes.
The study measures the effects of regular caffeine users:
> Participants were invited to participate if they were between 18-35 years of age, consumed between 1-2 cups of caffeinated beverages per day at least 5 days a week, did not smoke, were native English speakers, and took no psychiatric medications or painkillers on a regular basis. > [...] > Participants were asked to abstain from any caffeinated or alcoholic beverages from 4 pm on the day prior to the session.
I recently listened to Michael Pollan's Caffeine [0], which was on Audible's free monthly audiobook list recently. He argues (and I'm inclined to agree) that if you are a daily caffeine consumer, your daily cup of coffee does less in the way of cognitive enhancement, and more in the way of getting you back to your baseline (i.e. preventing caffeine withdrawal).
With this in mind, I think the study could be improved by having subjects who started off completely off caffeine for a few weeks. That way, we'd be more certain that the control group isn't going through caffeine withdrawal, and that the effect of caffeine isn't decreased by tolerance.
[0] https://www.audible.com/pd/Caffeine-Audiobook/B083MVZ91Y [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22503948
> Typically, the onset of symptoms starts 12 to 24 hours after caffeine cessation, peaks at 20–51 hours, and may last up to two to nine days.
> The severity of symptoms vary from individual to individual, and most commonly include a headache, fatigue, decreased energy/activeness, decreased alertness, drowsiness, decreased contentedness, depressed mood, difficulty concentrating, irritability, and feeling foggy/not clearheaded
> The incidence or severity of symptoms increased with increases in the daily dose, but abstinence from low doses, such as about one small cup of coffee per day, also produced symptoms of withdrawal.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK430790/
Cold turkey is the only effective way I've found to lower my dose. My personal caffeine withdrawal timeline is about 4-5 weeks (starting from say 400-500mg/day). The first few days are bad, the next few days are better. The second week is terrible. The third week is worse. Then it slowly gets better.
For my part withdrawal from going cold turkey is absolute hell unless I'm travelling or otherwise majorly changing my routine. Like with many other drugs, despite the severe physical effects, caffeine withdrawal is very dependent on mental state as well. I always tends to minimize or totally stop my caffeine intake when I go on holiday or visit family etc, and I don't notice any of the normal withdrawal effects.
If I for whatever reason want to "reset" outside of travel, I'll try to step down, and pre-emptively take a paracetamol/acetaminophen early evening because I tend to start getting shakes in the evening if I reduce my caffeine intake too quickly. Cold turkey is too brutal for me.
People don't seem to realise just how much caffeine can affect them. It can be incredibly useful, but like you I find it weird that people consume it ad hoc without carefully managing the doses. I suspect a lot of people spend a lot of time miserable without realising why because of it.
Effect duration for a psychoactive is related to half-life, but they aren't identical, and 'reset time' varies widely, e.g. MDMA is over in about 4 hours but it takes at minimum of two weeks before one can get a comparable effect again.
Did it affect you? Yes, it had an effect.
The psych study showed the meds were effective in improving patents' affect (mood).
I want to effect (bring about) change by doing X.
HTH!
"This is my brothers Ritalin, It's great for staying up and studying just don't try to write an English paper on it"
Not that you should strive for that scenario though.
However, even among stimulants, there are chemical differences between them, and they might act differently in the body. Also, coffee does contain a lot of other chemicals alongside the caffeine. Biology is never simple!
However, you can, in my experience, enhance the creative/lateral-thinking benefits of sleep cycles by adding carefully-timed/dosed caffeine as a stimulant. The basic kinds of patterns I've found to work well go something like: Bang your head on a hard problem to at least partial mental exhaustion, then consume coffee and go take a short nap. The stimulant buzz will slow down the process of falling asleep from exhaustion, and that slowed-down timeline gives you more minutes in that halfway-asleep state with your mind abuzz in lateral creative connections mode. Then you eventually make it into sleep and wake up later refreshed with new ideas.
Creativity tends to flow best standing in the shower, lying in bed, or out for a run or a bike ride.
Maybe a couple days reset wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
On the first day or of the break I'll just drink half the amount I normally drink. Then by day 2 I'll drink a third. Probably nicer to ease into it.
*I should point out that decaf still has a little caffeine in it
It is nice to have a more scientific basis to back that up, though.
> Coffee is a great power in my life; I have observed its effects on an epic scale. Coffee roasts your insides. Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring.
From "The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee, 1830, http://blissbat.net/balzac.html
Ah, in your experience. I missed that, initially.
I meant to write "Not khat," which gives me the best inspiration ever (and a crash that lasts days when I get off of it).
Then again I'm sure there are plenty of SV hipster types who might be big on it. "forget microdosing, khat is the new path to rockstar programming flow states"
Programming, unlike sport, isn't about one winner taking all. At least not on the level of individual programming skill.
It is not NZT from the movie Limitless, despite media hype.
As a productivity drug, amphetamines far outclass psychedelics.
They're not mutually exclusive, I'm sure there's significant overlap between the adderall and microdosing crowds.
So not really I guess
This part resonated with me:
> When you have reached the point of consuming this kind of coffee, then become exhausted and decide that you really must have more, even though you make it of the finest ingredients and take it perfectly fresh, you will fall into horrible sweats, suffer feebleness of the nerves, and undergo episodes of severe drowsiness.
I definitely get extremely drowsy any time after 5 pm when I have gotten into the habit of drinking plenty of coffee per day
He died aged 50 of heart attack.
I love coffee. Thanks for sharing.
Also first time seeing my alma mater on HN :)
The other thing is, for me caffeine results in more ideas bubbling out of my subconscious. This can be great for brainstorming-type creativity or getting unstuck while working on a creative project - but it's like operations research where you're solving the problem by adding another variable. It's not useful for more specific, constrained problems like the "divergent" tasks in the paper.
Has an interesting side effect of screwing with threshold of movement, particularly finger movement.
I play rhythm games (sifac, llsif, deresute, mirishita...) regularly and tried modafinil. My fingers wouldn't auto-move anymore, and furthermore even if I moved them consciously, it took more effort to do so.
At everything else, it puts caffeine to shame, with no tolerance buildup or withdrawal symptoms.
For problem solving, dwell on the problem in its domain just before bedtime, and make sure it's the last thing on your mind as you settle down into sleep. Let the subconscious have sole access to your understanding of the problem overnight.
Everybody's built different, but these work for me.