Why we're more creative at night and how to reproduce the effect
creativesomething.net
creativesomething.net
As a young adult, I managed to get away with it; my family and friends would often called me "lazy" or a "late sleeper" but I always pointed out that, although I woke up at 11, I went to bed at 4, so it's not like I'm sleep for 12 hours at a time.
However, as an adult, it's challenging; I have to get up early for work or school, but I crave the late-night dives into my thoughts.
Also, it's not that I necessarily like being alone—I wouldn't call myself a solitary person—but I find that the night is also productive and fertile time because there are fewer distractions: once everyone's asleep I can work undisturbed; for me there's something calming about the night/early morning.
When I on my kitchen at 10am, I'm a pure zombie, give me my coffee, let me prep and get the hell out of my way. But 8-9pm when I'm cleaning up , yeah I start getting more creative then (infact I designed my new waygu nori Maki last night from that), and when I'm at home, I'll still be thinking about recipes and jotting down notes to test and try during my zombie hours.
"Exhaustion, it appears, can spur creativity because, frankly, you just don’t give a damn."
This i can agree with. At the moment I'm short a chef, so I'm pulling 12-14 hour shifts every day. By Sunday(day 6), pretty worn out, but I find myself more willing to try crazy combinations.
Alcohol might help some times but as with every drugs: it's a loan. You have to repay it some time. Most of the time in the form of exhaustion.
Also: sometimes creativity without boundries is't interesting anymore because it has become too chaotic. So maybe some boundries are always needed.
For easy to confirm evidence of this, attempt to find support in the one reference cited for the statement that it is cited as a reference for.
Despite the article being four years old—I'd like to think I've come a way in terms of better referencing reliable sources since then—there is evidence in the reference cited that speaks directly to the claim, but you would have to stretch yourself to uncover it. Or you could just Google it I guess.
e.g. the claim from the article: "Your [pre]frontal cortex happens to be a major dopamine hub...it's the hub for processing dopamine" is formed from the association of dopamine's function within the frontal lobe; namely, and from the source, how depletion of it has been identified as a major hinderance to abilities stemming from that area of the brain.
Of course the all-reliable (/s) Wikipedia also tells us: "The frontal lobe contains most of the dopamine-sensitive neurons in the cerebral cortex." Dopamine certainly plays a major part in that region of the brain, again a Google search yields enough on the subject to warrant a statement of the variety I originally made.
Independent of the citation, I think it is misleading to call the whole frontal lobe (or even prefrontal cortex) a "hub" although reasonable to note the significance of dopamine there. The second sentence I consider factually incorrect considering the major role dopamine has in the striatum (also "processing dopamine" doesn't really describe what you are talking about).
As tempting as it is, connecting brain structure and functioning to human experience is more likely to be misleading than accurate and particularly so the shorter the explanation is (no matter how well researched and explained). Making such claims in this type of article is misrepresenting scientific knowledge and I encourage you to avoid doing so (as popular as this is :( ).
Ah, the mythical Ballmer Peak[1].