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I'm not sure how you can rule out reading burning calories. Our brains burn more calories than the rest of our bodies, and taxing a brain more oughta burn more.

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I'm reminded of finding out very recently that professional chess players burn a lot of calories.

Looks like the brain will burn 110cal/pound/day. So an average brain weight of 3lbs means 330cal/day total.

Hard for me to believe this number can increase to 10x that amount if we're to believe chess grandmasters are burning 6000cal/day (let's say 2300cal for the rest of the body, thus 3700cal for the brain). 6000 calories being the figure thrown around if you google it.

Sounds a bit like bullshit to me that a chess player can burn as many calories as a professional cyclist on an all-day race.

Have you ever put your finger on a CPU which has been pegged for a couple of minutes?

I'm sure it does, but even in a coma it burns something like 1200 calories a day. There's seems to be a pretty narrow window between the baseline and maximum.

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