> He taps his foot gently to keep his alertness on the highest level while still not losing too much energy. He chews gum.
Sounds like the kind of behavior you'd expect when hopped up on something tbh
Interrupting my focus state with "why are you doing that?" - doing what?
As I'm getting older, the tip of the foot can start to get a little numb if I'm too excited.
I did eventually "break the habit"[1] by paying undue attention to my leg for years and intentionally stopping when it started. What I don't know is if it would have gone away on its own, or if my effort fixed things.
[1] It comes back when I'm unusually tired or stressed, though.
So you're kind of proving the parent poster's point, no?
Or are you suggesting caffeine is not stimulant or a psychoactive drug?
Also, the foot tapping behavior can be related to caffeine consumption even if you also do it when not taking caffeine. Some people (like me) metabolize caffeine a lot slower than average, so its effects last a lot longer (twice longer or so, I think). Also, caffeine notably causes sleep disruption. And caffeine withdrawal can also cause irritability.
Caffeine can also increase anxiety or anxiety-related behaviors, and even if anxiety or these behaviors are not exclusively experienced while taking caffeine, it can still increase the likelihood and magnitude of its effects. These behaviors can also persist in the absence of substance intake for a variety of (psychological) reasons.
A typical cup of coffee contains about the same proportion of caffeine compared to a lethal caffeine dose than the proportion of one Aderall dosage compared to a lethal amphetamine dose.
How about that?
It's a decent measure for how much a certain amount of a drug is likely to cause immediate important effects in the body.
LSD does cause significant psychoactive effects with one thousandth of that amount, which suggests that for a typical isolated dose, LSD is safer than caffeine and amphetamines. Not to mention that LSD is not as addictive.
But I don't think that invalidates my underlying point regarding caffeine, even if the lethal dose is not a perfect measure.
Of course there is. I think you just proved you don't understand what a correlation is...
“Overdose: There have been no documented fatal human overdoses from LSD”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSD
Toxicity and psychoactivity are completely independent from one another. If you can’t understand that there’s not much else I can say to you.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
The simple fact is that doing any kind of mindsport intensely over an extended period is very draining.
More like, at the bottom[1].
Remark: is it just me, or do other people too hesitate to click a youtube link with no title given?
I feel like I at least want to know the title of the linked video, even if it doesn't reveal much about the video.
IMO it'd be very nice if people made a habit of Ctrl+c/v'ing the title along with a yt link.
Title: Making Beads That Vibrate To Cheat In Chess
Length: 18min, 54s
Channel: MixMorris (102k subscribers)
17,364 views
Oct 23, 2022 #chess #engineering
Description: "This video speaks for itself." (sic)
Title: "I created the ultimate Chess Ai (it can cheat)"
For anyone unaware, this all stems from the allegations made against Hans Niemann last year:
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/26/1201734274/chess-hans-niemann...
If a person already has good levels and healthy receptors, and they suddenly raise them too much, it just makes people obsessive and actually not focus well on the important task at hand.
It's a double-edged sword, always with warnings and side-effects.
If you don't, it's negatively impacting mental performance - but it's really good at helping you to deliver slightly subpar performance for grossly extended periods of time. (Common uses: Crisis situations where you cannot step away. Cramming for exams)
I suppose you could call this a different form of concentration, but AIUI it's more energy than concentration.
I think of it as basically stealing energy or enthusiasm from the future, though. You might feel energized and focused now, but it comes at the expense of less energy and focus when the drug wears off. The withdrawal effect is pretty mild if you take prescription doses of it though, e.g. Adderall (which is amphetamine). At normal moderate doses, taken in the morning, almost all of that energy can be recouped during sleep (though not all). I wouldn't want to take it daily for a long period of time though, otherwise you'll build up an 'energy deficit' that could lead to a crash.
P.S. I know people who have essentially destroyed their lives by becoming addicted to amphetamine or meth. It's a dangerous drug.
I wonder if there is something about the dopamine issues of the ADHD brain that prevents an addiction to substances that aid it.
When you lose about 3500 calories of energy via this process, you have burned a pound of fat.
That doesn't really have anything to do with the conversation though.
The biophysical origin (I'm a biophysicist) of weight change as a function of energy use, eating and excretion is a bit more complicated than that.
Like you said, it’s a bit more complicated than that and every body is different. But burning roughly 3500 calories will result in the body weighing roughly 1lb less (accounting for food and water intake and loss).
If it didn’t work this way, every bodybuilder and fitness enthusiast on the planet would have a very different approach to their diet.
1. They're stressed and therefor eating less, especially if they're spending the daytimes of the tournament playing games - hardly conducive to appetite, and in fact I expect many will avoid food purposefully to try to not get that sleepy-full feeling.
2. To a much lesser degree, increased stress == increased heartrate == increased BMR.
3. Maybe, and I hate to speculate because of the stigma (personally I don't care if chess players are doing drugs), some amphetamine use, or at least caffeine, all of which can suppress appetate further.
I personally very much doubt that it's the thinking hard that's actually burning calories.
Unfortunately, I can't even read the linked post! It's paywall'd.
I can drop 10 pounds this week trivially by triggering a water flush (change in diet), essentially at will. Wife absolutely hates it, but that’s water weight.
If thinking hard required a lot of energy, wouldn't we expect that thinking hard would cause an increased heart rate and faster breathing?
And anyway, the claim that chess players lose 1 pound per day does not pass a basic sanity check. 1 pound of fat = 3500 calories. If you raised all that energy instantaneously in the brain, it would raise brain temperature by around 2500 C (the average brain weighs ~1.5 kg and the brain is mostly water so I figure 1 Calorie ~= 1 degree C per kg). Obviously the energy doesn't release all at once and it wouldn't all be released by the brain, but that's still an implausibly high energy expenditure.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18987876/
[2] When I said "this is not true", I was thinking of the claim from the linked article that chess players burn 6000 calories per day, which is definitely false. Upon re-reading, I realized the parent comment did not actually make this claim. I am agnostic as to whether chess players lose 1 pound per day during tournaments, but if they do, it's definitely not because they're burning 1 extra pound of fat. It's plausible that they're eating much less and/or losing water weight.
As per usual, this claim has been repeated all over sports/medicine journalism with improper attribution and no mention of the caveats.
Some high level players like Sam Shankland are known to frequently cite physical fitness as crucial to their ability to perform in high level tournaments, where they might play that type of intense games all day for multiple days in a row.
(https://www.milibrary.org/tuesday-night-marathon, though I'm not playing the currently running one. You typically play just one game every Tuesday night for 10+ weeks in a row)
> Chess grandmasters spend hours sitting over game boards. And yet, high-level players lose 10 to 12 pounds on average over a 10-day tournament.