Burn-out visible in the brains of patients
jacquesmattheij.com
jacquesmattheij.com
On the plus side I have a new excuse for trips to Starbucks.
A famous example is L Peter Deutsch, the 'wunderkind' that programmed a LISP at the ripe old age of 15.
Read here:
http://devlinux.org/deutsch-interview.html
Or read 'coders at work'.
He's in to music mostly these days, hacks every now and then though.
At 15 I never brought it further than writing small basic programs on a tandy 'pocket' computer.
The first time dabbling in languages was writing a 6809 macro assemlber, but that had to wait until I was 17. Those really young kids cranking out code at that level really amaze me, I don't think I had even heard of LISP at that age.
Patrick Collison is really impressive, and I had the fortunate chance to randomly meet him at a coffee shop (he probably doesn't remember me). He is a YC alum, having founded and sold Auctomatic. He later created and sold an iPhone app that was a locally compressed copy of Wikipedia. Very cool. http://collison.ie/
I wrote a bit about how I ended up getting into Lisp at http://lemonodor.com/archives/001038.html. (And I'm glad I did, because I can hardly remember now.)
Not just because of your age, but mostly because you have things so 'together' at your age.
Most kids at the age of 15 are laying the seeds for the wasting of the next decade of their lives, you decided to lay the foundation for the rest of your life instead.
Keep going! And don't burn out! (please) The energy pit is not endless, even if it seems to be so. I've found that out the hard way.
Do people who claim depression/other ills independent of burn-out score the same? It's unclear how the burn-out group was chosen.
Also, I'm concerned about establishing burn-out as a disease (as am I with most psychological diseases) because the victim mentality can set in pretty quick (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_therapy for interesting reading on this). "Sorry, I can't work today. I'm burned out. But you can't fire me. See, I have this disease. It's not my fault."
Unless I'm mistaken, this is more commonly referred to as "vacation".
So if this was just a psychological issue you would not expect to find this correlation with a physical value that is at first glance not directly related to the ability of the brain to think (which is the pre-requisite for being productive in the first place).
If thinking about stuff really is harder for people that are burned out because of an underlying physical cause it would explain a lot.
For example, the measured brain states associated with burn out could be do to a chemical deficiency (either in diet or genetic), or be because the person worked a long day at work, or perhaps could be a result of the person staying up very late playing video games. Most people would agree that the first is a disease state, but what about the second? The third?
Finally, with respect to their finding that burnout was associated with smaller potentials, assuming that they made their measurements using fMRI[1], then they were measuring changes in blood flow, which in turn are putatively reflective of the metabolic activity of nearby neurons, which in turn is putatively reflective of their frequency of excitation, averaged over some interval. There are circumstances where the magnitude of individual action potentials are affected, but I strongly doubt that is what they are talking about here, not the least because I don't see how they could measure it.
1. If they instead used EEG, I can make a similar argument that they are still measuring frequency of excitation.
After all for a variety of psychological disorders there is no objective difference between a 'healthy' and a 'diseased' brain that we can nail down, to find one in this instance is an indication that there might be some clear underlying cause.
As long as that cause has not been found it's somewhat speculative but my guess is that if they can nail it down so clearly that a cause will one day be found.
Yes, kind of like how people with major depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and a host of other psychological afflictions feel like victims.
Of course, they are. That the problems are mental is no reason to put these things any lower on the "serious" scale than physical problems.
I'm all for accuracy and debate when figuring out whether certain "diseases" are made up or not, but once there's clear evidence that something is real, to pretend that it's not just because some people might use it as an excuse is ridiculous and cruel. Sure, people might abuse this as an excuse, sort of like how they lie all the time about the stomach flu and dying grandmothers, but that doesn't change the seriousness of the situation (and the fact that you really can't work) when you actually have one of those things happen to you. And the solution is, as before, to sniff out bullshit and punish it, not reject wholesale what doctors are saying is a legitimate excuse.
Of course, this has only been a single article, this is certainly not as well established as most other psychological problems are, so the jury is still out, for sure.
"Victim or not" is simply in the wrong ballpark. A depressive person is a patient. Many of them have real trouble with accepting this fact, which is a symptom of their disease. If you're not depressive, you should have less problems understanding it. Please don't make it harder for them by pushing in the wrong direction.
(I don't have access to the journal)
I'll add that link to the article. Thanks for identifying the oversight, I thought the term was common enough not to have to define it.