you gotta smoke a joint with your coffee before work too
In college we called that the "hippie speedball"
We would take adderall to work and study, and then smoke weed at 3am to go to sleep. Very fun but not very effective (for academic success)
Caffeine boosts problem-solving ability but not creativity, study indicates
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Re: Caffeine boosts problem-solving ability but not creativity, study indicates
#72Interesting study. I wonder what "enhanced problem solving significantly" means?
Also first time seeing my alma mater on HN :)
Re: Caffeine boosts problem-solving ability but not creativity, study indicates
#73At Game Jams I would always start things off with my "2 beers, 2 coffees" method. After the theme was announced, we'd go out and discuss ideas over a few beers (just not enough to get trashed), then, come back, flesh stuff out, get our coffee and go back to work. Worked out pretty well for generating some pretty wild ideas while not making ourselves disfunctional. Drink responsibly.
> not enough to get trashed But enough to reach the Ballmer Peak? https://xkcd.com/323/
Wouldn't the Ballmer Peak be pretty trashed? I don't really know how well BAC% correlates to drunkenness but that's almost double the legal limit for driving in the US.
Re: Caffeine boosts problem-solving ability but not creativity, study indicates
#74Re: Caffeine boosts problem-solving ability but not creativity, study indicates
#75Re: Caffeine boosts problem-solving ability but not creativity, study indicates
#76What boosts creativity? I sometimes used alcohol for song writing purposes. Are there healthier methods?
Some writer and artists would use the following: Hold a key in one of your hands and hang your hand down by your side while you let yourself fall asleep while sitting in a chair (honestly this first part sounds the most difficult). When you fall asleep—or rather the trance-like borderlands between awake and sleep— you should naturally drop the key (or whatever metallic, noise-making object) which should spring you ba…
Didn't Benjamin Franklin sleep at his desk with a stick propped under his elbow, so when the stick fell out he would invent stuff? I remember hearing that somewhere but now I can't find it
Re: Caffeine boosts problem-solving ability but not creativity, study indicates
#77Ha, if true that would confirm Balzac's claim: > Coffee is a great power in my life; I have observed its effects on an epic scale. Coffee roasts your insides. Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring. From "The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee, 1830, http://blissbat.net/balzac.html
I'm happy you posted this.
Re: Caffeine boosts problem-solving ability but not creativity, study indicates
#78Looking at Table 3, it seems like there is a consistent improvement in divergent problem solving, but it's well within the standard deviation for each row. So it may actually help with that and we just need many more data points.
The other thing is, for me caffeine results in more ideas bubbling out of my subconscious. This can be great for brainstorming-type creativity or getting unstuck while working on a creative project - but it's like operations research where you're solving the problem by adding another variable. It's not useful for more specific, constrained problems like the "divergent" tasks in the paper.
Re: Caffeine boosts problem-solving ability but not creativity, study indicates
#79Thank you for linking to the paper. The study measures the effects of regular caffeine users: > Participants were invited to participate if they were between 18-35 years of age, consumed between 1-2 cups of caffeinated beverages per day at least 5 days a week, did not smoke, were native English speakers, and took no psychiatric medications or painkillers on a regular basis. > [...] > Participants were asked to abstai…
Yep, I almost never drink coffee more than 3 days in a row because it loses its affect. Luckily, intolerance comes back after only a day or two off.
I was under the impression that on average the brain/body needs around 9 days of no caffeine consumption to get back to its natural baseline. I can't seem to find the source of that study right now...
Re: Caffeine boosts problem-solving ability but not creativity, study indicates
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Beer code tends to forget about edge cases in my experience, so yeah
Yeah, a former colleague of mine told me they used to regularly drink a pint of beer with an evening of coding, until on one occasion they introduced a subtle bug which took them two days to hunt down. They were working in C, which makes it a lot easier to introduce subtle bugs than most languages, but I certainly think twice about coding while under the influence since I heard that story!
Are we to infer that your colleague hardly ever made subtle bugs?
I can make plenty of those.. and I've never had beer.