On a cultural note regarding the threads, the moralistic make do with what god gives you side and the yay drink coffee and do stuff and be happy side have been around a long time. A little Bach Cantata about a grumpy old dad and his coffee drinking daughter: https://youtu.be/nifUBDgPhl4?feature=shared
Caffeine suppresses cerebral grey matter responses to chronic sleep restriction
121–130 of 236 posts
Re: Caffeine suppresses cerebral grey matter responses to chronic sleep restriction
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, there is almost nowhere on earth where a Hunter-gatherer can survive any more. The few remaining have been pushed to the very edge of survival by agriculturalists taking all the best land.
When I understood this is when I formally became an anarchist. Before grasping that, I didn't realize that I really didn't have a choice, no matter what. You serve or you die. Those are the options.
I used to think that was what this song was about: https://youtu.be/wC10VWDTzmU
Re: Caffeine suppresses cerebral grey matter responses to chronic sleep restriction
#123I love my caffeine. But caffeine is an addictive, highly profitable substance. So advertising it and trying to promote it as somehow having real health benefits is widespread. I would not be surprised if routine consumption of caffeine was at least mildly detrimental to health. I think some drugs have managed to gain a special place in our society . Advertising and lobbying warps our perception of these drugs. I even…
> highly profitable substance Yes and no. I've been a fan of caffeine pills for years. They are very cheap, readily available (portable), and most importantly to me offer completely consistent dosing. With caffeine pills I'm able to ensure I stay below the FDA recommended maximum daily intake of 400 mg (worst case). Another fun bonus - when a physician asks you what your caffeine intake is and you respond in milligra…
Caffeine pills. Woah... so I guess I knew they existed but didn't actually know what their purpose was, but what you say about consistency is totally on the mark. I measure everything in my coffee process, and I'm lucky in Melbourne that so many cafes do too, but yes - I avoid most cafes that look like they have average and dark beans because of the wild inconsistencies and most certantly burned taste.
So do you take them to maintain alertness as anyone else would with coffee, to boost nootropics, or none of the above? Sorry for being nosey but this is interesting to me, because if I'm away from my machine and going to an unknown place then I take my portable handheld espresso machine and already ground beans, but a simple tablet sounds WAY more convenient!!
Re: Caffeine suppresses cerebral grey matter responses to chronic sleep restriction
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> caffeine addicts are standing in line at Starbucks Have you considered that those people queuing outside Starbucks might be drinking coffee because they enjoy the whole experience? Caffeine pills are an absurdity to me because I only drink coffee for the taste. Why suffer the unwanted effects of a drug without the enjoyment that it’s supposed to come with?
> Have you considered that those people queuing outside Starbucks might be drinking coffee because they enjoy the whole experience? Not the OP, but to respond to your question I think that Starbucks is actually hitting its customers with a triple-whammy of caffeine, sugar, and fat that most brains can't resist addiction to. Are you sure they actually enjoy Starbucks coffee and not its addictive components?
> Are you sure they actually enjoy Starbucks coffee and not its addictive components?
That's the same thing. Enjoying the components of something is basically the definition of enjoying something.
Re: Caffeine suppresses cerebral grey matter responses to chronic sleep restriction
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does cocaine temporarily boost intelligence? I thought it boosted the feeling of being intelligent.
> Does cocaine temporarily boost intelligence? I thought it boosted the feeling of being intelligent. For people who lack confidence or an ego, this may very well be the same thing. Just the urge to prove myself got me far in life. Sometimes I clearly struggle more than others, especially when surrounded by extremely smart people at university, but at the end of the day I've gotten much further than those who capitul…
I've long believed most people can learn most things if they're willing (and able) to make the effort and have the right resources available to them.
When I left university, I started a job writing Android apps that required high-performance and low-level stuff, at the start I couldn't imagine it ever being "easy", I struggled at first to understand it all, and often wondered if I'd ever be good at it; but over time as I learned more and more of it, it got easier, then a few short years later I was a team lead, teaching others.
10+ years before this, as a child, I couldn't imagine understanding how to compile a driver for Linux and the dependencies and so on, I was tinkering with distros and reverse engineering/cracking software as a young teen, fast forward to now, I run Linux exclusively, write software targeting it exclusively and teach others as team lead (different company, different team, different role, different software, no longer client-side)
These are just two major examples that have affected my every day life, both of these things put me through immense frustration and took years to develop to "expert".
There have been others, but my take away was that I've done it before, I can always do it again, it gets a bit harder and a bit slower with age, but I've more experience underpinning anything I do try to learn (tech or otherwise) and am better at learning.
For me, it was all about proving myself, mostly to myself, and being unwilling to fail. These days, I pick and choose what it is if I don't believe I have the time or resources (or desire) to succeed, we don't have to be good at everything, just whats important; the aforementioned skills pay my bills, allow me and my family to live comfortably, etc. I could learn to play the piano (I still might), but I don't _need_ to.
Re: Caffeine suppresses cerebral grey matter responses to chronic sleep restriction
#126>> Each participant underwent a 9-day laboratory visit consisting of one adaptation day, 2 baseline days (BL), 5-day sleep restriction (5 h time-in-bed), and a recovery day (REC) after an 8-h sleep opportunity.
Was this a vacation? Was this study done at a resort? During push times I aspire to 5-hour sleep times. Talk to anyone in any branch of the military. During any sort of active operation, 5-hours in bed is total luxury. Or fishers. Or cops. Or food service workers. Or doctors.
Re: Caffeine suppresses cerebral grey matter responses to chronic sleep restriction
#127I am growingly convinced that coffee/caffeine hit people in very different ways. https://www.23andme.com/topics/wellness/caffeine-consumption... has a few fun citations to look through on this, but discussions of how varied we are with how it impacts us is ridiculously invisible in most discussions of it. Sleep is similar. We speak of "night owls" and such, but most discussion around the varied needs of sleep are age…
I'm one of those.
I have this super weird thing where I'm hyper-sensitive to caffeine, and its effects will hit me sometimes 6+ hours later.
If I have a cup of coffee in the late morning, it will keep me up most of the night, and a single cup of coffee will make me manic-ish.
People have (doctors included) told me that what I was experiencing was impossible, that caffeine in metabolized in a certain way and completely out of your system quickly.
Turns out, that's true with most people, unless you have a variant in the CYP1A2 gene, which can cause the effects I experience.
Re: Caffeine suppresses cerebral grey matter responses to chronic sleep restriction
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does. Intelligence is the capacity for learning potential and cocaine boosts the ability to retain and process learned sensory matter, even when sleepy. That is really the greatest appeal of that drug. Again, I strongly do not recommend reliance on any stimulants, especially powerful ones like cocaine.
Interesting can you cite a source? I found this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2096405/ which shows a consistent improvement in tests, but the performance increase was only 4%. I'd be willing to guess that the improvement would be higher when sleepy/fatigued (up to a point!) since it would increase the alertness of the user, but I have never seen anything that suggests cocaine boosts the ability to retain informati…
Anecdata here, but I met a person in university in the 90s who claimed:
1) they had access to really, really pure cocaine, and
2) they used it to study for tests.
If I recall correctly, they were only using cocaine for the studying, not the test taking, and that they had good recall on tests.
Re: Caffeine suppresses cerebral grey matter responses to chronic sleep restriction
#129Caffeine does nothing for me at all, I do not get a kick when I drink coffee. It does not affect my sleep, it does not give me a boost at all. So I am a bit of jealous of those who can utilize caffeine for mental boost, I just drink it for the taste.
I used to say the same thing until I tried different types of coffee and different amounts.
The average expresso doesn't do much.
Also if you are already feeling well, it's unlikely you will feel a big difference unless you consume a high dosage of caffeine, which can also cause you some anxiety.
Caffeine is great when we are feeling low energy or sleepy.
Re: Caffeine suppresses cerebral grey matter responses to chronic sleep restriction
#130Side topic, but dropping coffee was the best thing I ever did. I used to drink only one cup a day, rarely two, for many years - but turns out when I stopped (for reasons unrelated) my anxiety unexpectedly 80% went away after a week or so without any other changes in my lifestyle. It was a big difference and I feel now very different than what I used to. I wake up much better rested too (much easier to get out of bed). Too bad, I really loved the taste but it's not worth it for me.
I encourage anyone to give it a try a few weeks and see how they feel. You may not realize what you thought is your baseline is in fact caused by caffeine sensitivity. I heard of some people being sensitive to caffeine but I never thought it would affect me, after all I did not have that bad of a reaction but it really built up and I had gotten used to it.