Ask HN: What lifestyle choices have led to improved cognitive function/memory?

There is a difference between ”exercise” and ”power lifting”.

Cardio is definitely good for you, even though it releases the same peptides. In cardio you progress by going longer.

Lifting is a different beast. In it you progress by increasing weights, because increasing reps does not gain muscle as fast. Each trip to the gym causes muscle damage, which also releases opioids, and it is completely possible to become dependent on that in the same manner that someone cutting themselves becomes dependent on the opioids released by cutting.

That is a loaded and oversimplified question.

Addiction and dependence are not matters of how much drugs someone has in their bloodstream; they are matters of why there is drugs in the bloodstream.

A terminal pain patient could be having a daily dose of morphine equal to an opioid abuser’s, but we usually don’t consider them addicts, because they have a reason to use opioids for pain management.

An opioid addict could be consuming a quarter of a codeine tablet a day and still be considered an addict, because emotion management is not usually considered a valid reason to use opioids.

For some reason, a lot of people recommend going to the gym as a first-line treatment for various emotional issues. I find this doublethink hilarious.

One thing for me was paying attention to what I ate, and what my brain did after I ate it. I found that some things would slam my brain anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours after I ate them. My mind did better if I stopped (or at least reduced) eating those things.

The only “loaded and oversimplified” rhetoric here is your refusal to consider even the simplest facts of the matter beyond “opioid receptors are activated at all!”

The only “doublethink” is how you claim not to be opposed to exercise in one comment while denigrating the very thought of going to the gym in another, in spite of clear evidence that lack of exercise is broadly detrimental to one’s mental state, rather than your narrative of “self-medication with endorphins that induces dependence and withdrawal symptoms where none existed before”. And claim that some source of endorphin release is good when that contradicts your only rationale for equating exercise with opiate abuse.

Even if you close your eyes, you would still know where your monitors are, where your keyboard is, where your laptop is, and so on. You would know where your bed was. Where the table where you eat sat and the number of chairs around it. If you want to have a better memory, put things into the part of you that handles remembering where objects are in the spaces you occupy.

To do that you need to be able to encode information into objects and decode objects back into information. You also need to put the encoded information in storage - a spatial context. Once you've written an object to this spatial storage, you can read it back out again by remembering that space. You can also move through the space in a predetermined way. Your mind will recall the other objects you told it were in that space. So you'll see them there as you move through the space.

There is literally a part of your mind dedicated to handling this type of spatial association. You will need to practice it so you can build connections to it so your memory can improve from it. You can get an MRI and see the difference between people who practice this technique and those who don't, because they have more connections to this region than those who aren't winning memory competitions.

The trouble is that the encoding and decoding step are hard to learn. You'll be really slow at doing that part until you practice it a lot.

You've probably heard of this technique of memorization by using your spatial memory. This is the method of loci or the memory palace technique. It was once more well known that it is now. Writing and reading supplanted it as the dominant way to memorize things.