Anyone who's taken any kind of brain medication that has worked (be it SS/NRIs or DNRIs or antipsychotics or stimulant medications) can tell you how much of what we think "we are", is significantly affected by neurochemistry (amongst a lot of other things too!)
I am not sure how much someone who hasn't experienced it (themselves or via a family member/friend) can really appreciate, and I wish for people to be more cognizant and supportive in general, rather than being judgemental or going "I could do it, why can't you?"
I mentioned it specifically because it’s generally considered as a physical body/muscle targeted supplement and not a brain impacting one, but it appears to have an impact on the brain too.
(Anecdotally I did notice a negative impact on sleep personally, but for me it was quite apparent even at a relatively low dose so I realised it quickly, hopefully that’s not the case for you.)
Your body creates all of the creatine that it needs. However, to do this, your body will need to get all of the nutrients that it can't make for itself.
The brain is like the 'kernel' and the body is mere 'user space'. Regardless of what the situation is in the body as a whole, the brain is top priority, and this applies to creatine. Trust your body, it will ensure that it has adequate creatine for the brain, no matter what happens to you.
Clearly there are advantages in supplementing creatine as any person in the gym will tell you. However, you have two options, either you supplement or you don't. If you don't want to take the supplement route then you can optimise your diet so that your body gets all of the raw inputs it needs. This means adequate levels of everything needed, without the junk.
My suspicion is that the brain and liver have a better idea of what level of creatine your body needs than any medical expert or social media influencer on the planet. Primates have been doing this for millions of years, standing on the shoulders of mammal DNA that has been dialling it in for hundreds of millions of years.
For me it is therefore a philosophical question. Do I want to believe in nutrition or do I want to believe in gym-bro science?
Aside from the alleged benefits for the brain, there is also the body. I don't want my muscles to be any larger than they need to be. In highly demanding factory jobs or in the military, the people with 'Rambo' bodies don't seem to be as effective as those that have muscles that have auto-sized to the demands placed on them. There is a cost in calories and nutrients to having excess muscle (and fat, for that matter).
It seems to me that the body works on a use it or lose it basis. Don't use your legs and they wither away. Don't use your brain and the same applies. My theory, for which I have no evidence, is that, with your internal organs, the same applies. If you are getting your creatine from animal products or supplements, will your liver lose the ability to create creatine? I don't know, but why run the risk?
By taking the nutrition route I am not running the risks of side effects. With creatine it began with elite athletes a few decades ago and only recently have fitness industry devotees been taking creatine en-masse. We don't know if there are long term side effects because there are no centenarians around that were taking creatine in the 1940s.
A final aspect to it is integrity. If the belief is in nutrition rather than supplements, then one cannot accuse oneself of cheating. Different strokes for different folks, if people want to pump their bodies with supplements, hormones and whatnot, that is on them. They want to be the fastest or the strongest. I don't. My believe is in what I consider to be a healthy diet with zero supplements apart from vitamin B12.
My advice is to take it and learn from your body, to see what the effects are, then end the experiment to see how you compare on a Mediterranean or a whole food, plant based diet. These diets are the benchmarks for longevity, which is what you might want to optimise for.
Why supplement vitamin B12, incidentally?
Wrt ibuprofen, I find it can (at times) massively clear out my brain fog. I suspect it’s primarily due to its anti inflammatory effects. The worse my baseline is, the more noticeable its benefits (upto a point, and apparently dose dependent). I often feel inflammation due to less sleep and due to another chronic heath condition, ibuprofen is like wiping a dirty glass or window clean.
I should probably add that I likely have more inflammation than the average person by a significant amount unfortunately, so your mileage may vary, but when I mentioned it to my GP he wasn’t surprised at all at its effects.
Do they also increase the homicidal ideations?
Reddit’s r/nootropics is one, I seem to remember blue light forum and longecity also have lots of info about more “cutting edge” experimentation.
As always, be cautious, and oftentimes common and well tolerated things (for example theanine) can be much better than some research peptides.
Makes sense. Same for large software projects, my boat, house, etc.
Maybe the next breakthrough in cloud computing isn’t more cores or larger GPUs, but better energy allocation and anticipation, just like the brain.
What good is having all data and knowledge somewhere else than in your pocket when and where you need it, so having computing devices in form factors convenient for human beings must be a major driving factor.
Remains to be seen if everything will still revolve around data centres or if devices will start talking to each other in the future, which might be a more democratic way to go.
Obviously, there are a huge range of possible problems there. Overclocking CPUs is dangerous for heat reasons and the brain generates a lot of heat. Without a doubt, lots of things in the body and mind are evolved around the assumption of a 5-10Hz clock rate. But even just a doubling, or an increase in the efficiency of neuronal transmission ... well, the mind boggles even just trying to imagine what could be done if you can optimize neuronal transmission.
This study was about the difference in energy consumption when you are "thinking hard", compared to just resting.
Now available energy is almost certainly not the only reason we have fatigue, so maybe there's other barriers to overcome, but I'm shocked at how little attention this topic gets. In hackernews spirit, if someone could sell a real cure for mental fatigue, you'd change the world
I don't think we will have a way to "cure" mental fatigue until we more completely understand both the mechanisms behind thinking, as well as resting, and at the moment we barely scratched the surface of them.
On one hand, I understand -- and feel very directly -- physical fatigue, and the metabolic limitations if I try to say run slowly versus push hard up to my lactate threshold. I am currently training for a marathon, and know to train by following progressively heavier loads of long distance runs, interval training, stretches and rest periods to develop my speed and endurance.
But mental fatigue really just isn't a phenomenon that I personally relate to. I know some people say they can perhaps work 4-6 focused hours in a work day, and that's it. Whereas my brain seems to be able to work at essentially the same intensity for as long as I want it to, up to 18 hours a day, and then I need a bit of sleep to recover. So I don't quite comprehend mental fatigue, or what a cure for it would be. I don't even know how I would increase my ability to avoid mental fatigue other than minimising distractions (like HN!) and just keep thinking more for longer.
How do other people here experience mental fatigue (or not)?
In other words, you don't want to sleep or lie down, you want to stop thinking.
Working a few hours in such environment is very fatiguing.
On the other hand, when I work on a single thing, no disturbance, clear problem definition, having all necessary skills to do the thing, I can work 10h and it's not fatiguing.
To keep it short, for me, It is like I can think down a path, but slowly, it is like I have this plodding speed, if I try to think 'quicker' (or more reactive/agile) it feels like a lot of effort, like I have to focus and push myself. The more effort I apply the more energy I use. The more energy I use the longer this state lasts for. The longer this state lasts for the more chance I develop physical issues. When I am in this state, I can't mentally fit pieces together. It is like I am wearing oven mits and trying to build lego. It just doesn't fit together. oh and I get really clumsy, my movement becomes really uncoordinated.
So it is like I have a smaller pool of energy, and I can spend it slowly over a longer period. Or faster over a shorter period. When I go over my limits, then see above.
The only cure, is rest, and that is usually about 3 days of not pushing myself mentally too hard, to get back to a reasonable baseline. It is improving, if we had had this conversation three years ago...
I have seen this in other devs, a friend of mine has MS and she needs to meter her energy levels like this. My neighbour came out of hospital after a serious illness and she has some of these symptoms. It is more common than you would think.
> Our neurons, however, have an average firing rate of 4 hertz, 50 to 60 times less than what is optimal for information transmission.
Could this explain the time dilation you can get when under high stress - is this your brain just firing as fast as it can?
As for the internal sense of time, there isn't a consensus as to how it is kept, but for the cognitive time scale, it seems that it is a distributed time keeping mechanism rather than some sort of central unified clock mechanism.
Our brains only developed their abstract reasoning capabilities after we already possessed a cognitive ‘platform’ for learning in a very physical context. Or rather, our cognitive capabilities for things that may seem totally extraneous to reasoning in fact developed in tandem with it. Think, fine motor control over our fingers and opposable thumbs, and the corresponding development of spatial and physical reasoning and hierarchical planning, that allows us to analyse a problem and build a tool with our hands to solve it.
The ‘bitter lesson’ [0] seems to be that we humans are not very good at designing the algorithmic machinery for cognition—better we let the machine discover its own mechanisms. Take the case of AlphaGo, the performance of which greatly improved when the human data was thrown away.
So, perhaps there is a pathway to artificial reasoning that shortcuts past many functions of an artificial brain, as you put it, but it also looks quite like we’re not ourselves going to be able to architect it, and that reasoning has not emerged from the current LLM paradigm of digesting the written knowledge of all humanity.
Where human general-purpose abstract reasoning naturally arose from concrete, goal-directed interaction with the physical world, perhaps we need to recreate that environment for machines to learn to learn and reason themselves.
That need not necessarily be physically embodied, which would surely be heavily constrained in numbers of learning trials. Quickly searching turned up this [1] example of reinforcement learning to walk in a sim, which is then transferred to physical.
I wonder how far the approach can go... Could agents learn to talk to each other? Looks like there’s some recent research in that direction too [2].
[0]: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...
[1]: https://www.figure.ai/news/reinforcement-learning-walking
[2]: https://www.ifaamas.org/Proceedings/aamas2024/pdfs/p2725.pdf
From the article: "Jamadar’s analysis showed that a brain performing active tasks consumes just 5% more energy compared to a resting brain. When we are engaged in an effortful, goal-directed task, such as studying a bus schedule in a new city, neuronal firing rates increase in the relevant brain regions or networks — in that example, visual and language processing regions. This accounts for that extra 5%; the remaining 95% goes to the brain’s base metabolic load."
To me it is fairly obvious that those tasks are not what creates the highest loads on the brain. The "thinking load" from active, in-person, social interactions is much higher.
When grandmasters battle it out for hours in classic chess, thinking ahead of so many branches of moves that I would find unfathomable, they do burn through a lot of energy.
For what is quite a sedentary career choice, I rarely see overweight grandmasters. Though that is probably more correlation of other facts than causation...
Whole body context: - Base Metabolic Rate (awake): ~1.0-1.1 kcal/kg/hr - Deep Sleep Metabolic Rate: 0.8-0.9 kcal/kg/hr
CG says brain follows this as well.
So it suggests brain power use varies from 0.8 minimum to 1.1, with an extra 0.05 for thinking. This supports ideas that thinking is a relatively minor brain function, at least energetically.
The same is true for households, if it's winter, and you have the heating on, washing clothes, cooking, mining bitcoin, they are all free, since every Joule metered in the electricity meter converts to heat.
gleenn•11h ago