Re:Paul Erdős: a life that added up to something (1996)
by pmoriarty on Friday October 07, 2016 @11:28PM
(#12665527)
An interesting Freudian slip.
You wrote: "...whether this thing I can do at an incredible actually mattered."
leaving out the word "speed" (another term for amphetamines).
It reminds me of Jung's word association experiments, where his data showed that people would pause for longer periods of time when the words in the test hit on subjects that held a strong emotional charge for them.
I felt the side effects too strongly and while I did many, many things, I could only crank out unimportant widgets and the executive functions of my brain were diminished as to whether this thing I can do at an incredible [speed / pace] actually mattered.
One example from college is reading chapters of a physics book and copying the vocabulary and definitions for a hundred or more words in a single session. In an unaltered state, I could maybe do half to a whole chapter and 1–2 dozen words before feeling saturated.