Caffeine boosts problem-solving ability but not creativity, study indicates
news.uark.edu
news.uark.edu
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 abstain from any caffeinated or alcoholic beverages from 4 pm on the day prior to the session.
I recently listened to Michael Pollan's Caffeine [0], which was on Audible's free monthly audiobook list recently. He argues (and I'm inclined to agree) that if you are a daily caffeine consumer, your daily cup of coffee does less in the way of cognitive enhancement, and more in the way of getting you back to your baseline (i.e. preventing caffeine withdrawal).
With this in mind, I think the study could be improved by having subjects who started off completely off caffeine for a few weeks. That way, we'd be more certain that the control group isn't going through caffeine withdrawal, and that the effect of caffeine isn't decreased by tolerance.
[0] https://www.audible.com/pd/Caffeine-Audiobook/B083MVZ91Y [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22503948
Cold turkey is the only effective way I've found to lower my dose. My personal caffeine withdrawal timeline is about 4-5 weeks (starting from say 400-500mg/day). The first few days are bad, the next few days are better. The second week is terrible. The third week is worse. Then it slowly gets better.
For my part withdrawal from going cold turkey is absolute hell unless I'm travelling or otherwise majorly changing my routine. Like with many other drugs, despite the severe physical effects, caffeine withdrawal is very dependent on mental state as well. I always tends to minimize or totally stop my caffeine intake when I go on holiday or visit family etc, and I don't notice any of the normal withdrawal effects.
If I for whatever reason want to "reset" outside of travel, I'll try to step down, and pre-emptively take a paracetamol/acetaminophen early evening because I tend to start getting shakes in the evening if I reduce my caffeine intake too quickly. Cold turkey is too brutal for me.
People don't seem to realise just how much caffeine can affect them. It can be incredibly useful, but like you I find it weird that people consume it ad hoc without carefully managing the doses. I suspect a lot of people spend a lot of time miserable without realising why because of it.
> Typically, the onset of symptoms starts 12 to 24 hours after caffeine cessation, peaks at 20–51 hours, and may last up to two to nine days.
> The severity of symptoms vary from individual to individual, and most commonly include a headache, fatigue, decreased energy/activeness, decreased alertness, drowsiness, decreased contentedness, depressed mood, difficulty concentrating, irritability, and feeling foggy/not clearheaded
> The incidence or severity of symptoms increased with increases in the daily dose, but abstinence from low doses, such as about one small cup of coffee per day, also produced symptoms of withdrawal.
Did it affect you? Yes, it had an effect.
The psych study showed the meds were effective in improving patents' affect (mood).
I want to effect (bring about) change by doing X.
HTH!
Effect duration for a psychoactive is related to half-life, but they aren't identical, and 'reset time' varies widely, e.g. MDMA is over in about 4 hours but it takes at minimum of two weeks before one can get a comparable effect again.
> 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
So not really I guess
This part resonated with me:
> When you have reached the point of consuming this kind of coffee, then become exhausted and decide that you really must have more, even though you make it of the finest ingredients and take it perfectly fresh, you will fall into horrible sweats, suffer feebleness of the nerves, and undergo episodes of severe drowsiness.
I definitely get extremely drowsy any time after 5 pm when I have gotten into the habit of drinking plenty of coffee per day
He died aged 50 of heart attack.
I love coffee. Thanks for sharing.
Ah, in your experience. I missed that, initially.
I meant to write "Not khat," which gives me the best inspiration ever (and a crash that lasts days when I get off of it).
Then again I'm sure there are plenty of SV hipster types who might be big on it. "forget microdosing, khat is the new path to rockstar programming flow states"
It is not NZT from the movie Limitless, despite media hype.
As a productivity drug, amphetamines far outclass psychedelics.
They're not mutually exclusive, I'm sure there's significant overlap between the adderall and microdosing crowds.
Programming, unlike sport, isn't about one winner taking all. At least not on the level of individual programming skill.
Drink responsibly.
I also sometimes find solutions to hard problems in my head when stoned, though I usually just write down the solution rather than coding it, as large-scale implementations are better done sober.
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!
I can make plenty of those.. and I've never had beer.
Caffeine-code is much easier to follow later.
But enough to reach the Ballmer Peak? https://xkcd.com/323/
Which at 18ml ethanol each equates to 9 UK 'units', which is about 3 and half pints or ~90% of a bottle of wine.
Of course 'trashed' or 'drunkenness' both depend on the person, and are subjective anyway, and the time taken to consume them has a big impact too - necking 4 pints is very different to a bottle over the course of a full evening, for example.
But personally no, I don't think I'd program very well in either case.
At the same time, I believe none of the "studies" claiming health benefits of it.
One only has to study what it does to your brain to make a sound conclusion. (or read some of those studies and look at the bogus methods they often use)
It also affects sleep in a negative way, with poor sleep being at the root of most health problems including cancer ... (lookup stuff on sleep by Matthew Walker)
Likewise, I don't know what to think of all the "coffee is good for your heart" studies that surfaced in the past decade. It used to be that coffee was clearly bad for cardiovascular health then with the rise of Starbucks and global markets it became huge business and suddenly studies making ridiculous claims (like "10 cups of coffee a day is fine, science says") started to appear.
I can't see how something that unnaturally raises your adrenaline, cortisol and blood pressure (on daily basis for most) can be that great for your heart.
Finally, most people drink coffee on empty stomach, something that can easily lead to ulcers or even worse. Caffeine irritates it and high acid doesn't help either (reason why we add milk to coffee - it neutralises the acid) ... I find the rise of the hipster coffee brands pushing highly acidic brewing and roasting methods problematic.
But the fact is, nobody is telling you the full truth. Take top 1000 google results for coffee, it's 90% sellers, affiliates and journalists. People either make money from coffee or are addicted to it.
I love coffee myself, but I don't believe none of the proclaimed benefits. I consider caffeine a stimulant ... it's good to stay off it and use it's power selectively ... at the right time for the right kind if work, not mindlessly every morning.
Finally, I appreciate the cultural aspect ... like hanging out in Viennese style cafe, read something or engage in 'stimulating' conversations.
This idea is prevalent and I don't get it. It may mask the taste of acidity, but milk is itself mildly acidic. It shouldn't change the pH any more than water.
My point here was that the coffee became a huge business sometime at the end of the 90 and big corporations were built on the back of it, not only Starbucks ... this wasn't so before 90s ... it was in the early 2000s that numerous positive studies started to pop out and the perception started to shift ... for example, in the early 2000 the central Europe market was suddenly dominated by German instant coffee brands and I remember reading an article citing a study that states that coffee is healthy but only instant one, the ground roasted causes cancer because of the roasting.
This is just my observation. But I would also like to add that today everyone demands a "study" to prove a point and it seems to me that it has effect of people delegating their own observational skills and logic to 3-rd party, often untrustworthy and often merely journalist articles citing a study. You need to employ both observation and studies that you examined for trustworthiness.
Lots of thumbnail drawings and constructive criticism from a teammate is the meat of it.
Also... be naturally good at divergent thinking I guess? I love working with people who are naturally divergent. They tell the funniest jokes.
The caffeinated group outperformed the noncaffeinated on all 5 creativity metrics. The sample size and effect size were too small to prove caffeine caused an improvement.
How did that turn into this title?
However, after months of amphetamines I felt like I was a workhorse with no novel ideas or approaches, but still very efficient.
I've heard that mathematicians carry a well-tested mental toolset that enable them to solve all kinds of problems. So, perhaps if you have the right toolset and you just need to put work on an problem, amphetamines can work great.
I can't really determine what the right cost/benefit trade-off here. Reading beyond the abstract is rather time consuming and is not something I can afford for every paper.
However, even among stimulants, there are chemical differences between them, and they might act differently in the body. Also, coffee does contain a lot of other chemicals alongside the caffeine. Biology is never simple!
However, you can, in my experience, enhance the creative/lateral-thinking benefits of sleep cycles by adding carefully-timed/dosed caffeine as a stimulant. The basic kinds of patterns I've found to work well go something like: Bang your head on a hard problem to at least partial mental exhaustion, then consume coffee and go take a short nap. The stimulant buzz will slow down the process of falling asleep from exhaustion, and that slowed-down timeline gives you more minutes in that halfway-asleep state with your mind abuzz in lateral creative connections mode. Then you eventually make it into sleep and wake up later refreshed with new ideas.
"This is my brothers Ritalin, It's great for staying up and studying just don't try to write an English paper on it"
Not that you should strive for that scenario though.
Maybe a couple days reset wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
*I should point out that decaf still has a little caffeine in it
On the first day or of the break I'll just drink half the amount I normally drink. Then by day 2 I'll drink a third. Probably nicer to ease into it.
Creativity tends to flow best standing in the shower, lying in bed, or out for a run or a bike ride.
I sometimes used alcohol for song writing purposes. Are there healthier methods?
My wife (a psychologist) and I discuss this regularly around poetry, music, painting, etc. Some of the most "beautiful" works come from unhealthy emotional states. And that a lot of the sameness we get today in popular culture arises when art is cultivated by large organizations which are inherently are devoid of emotion, and are pushing populism instead of beauty.
You can see it very easily today in popular music. If you look back to the 1990s and the rise of alternative music, hundreds of one-hit-wonders, 8 different "Natalie"s, etc. And today where one-hit-wonders don't really exist anymore because Clear Channel has cultivated a sound and artists that don't conform that sound are not going to get airplay, and not have a run-away one-hit-wonder and fade back into obscurity and cult-fandom.
Meanwhile, my Discover Weekly in Spotify and the channels spun from those artists have many thousands of songs that are considerably better than anything on the radio, but will never get airtime.
Here's a good example of what a real radio station would sound like today if we still had DJs and the freedom to play anything:
https://radioparadise.com/player
I asked Bill (the owner) 13 years ago about opening a station in my town to simply play his stream on FM but he broke the news to me that it's not really possible. It would cost something like $100,000 dollars (probably $250,000 today) just to get the license.
I also got the feeling that it would be so expensive to operate (in electricity alone) that stations are no longer viable as self-sustaining entities. They make their money by cross-promotion of other stations and businesses under an umbrella corporation.
The only way to break up this stagnation is antitrust enforcement IMHO. Bring back the Broadcast Station Cross-Ownership Rule at the very least, then go further to also break up the big media duopolies like CNN/Fox News (which of course will not happen in these times):
https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/fccs-review-broadcast-o...
In 2017, the Commission eliminated PDF Download its rule that had previously prohibited common ownership of a full-power broadcast station and a daily newspaper if the station's contour (defined separately by type of station) completely encompassed the newspaper's city of publication and the station and newspaper were in the same relevant Nielsen market. At the same time, the Commission also eliminated the radio-television cross-ownership rule, which had restricted the common ownership of broadcast radio and television stations located in the same market. These two rules -- the newspaper-broadcast cross ownership and radio-television cross ownership rules -- were eliminated due in part to the growth in the number and variety of sources of entertainment, news and information in the modern media marketplace.
Linkin Park's Bennington Talked numerous times about how his drug addictions helped him creatively despite him wanting to be sober. His later more sober songs kinds suck tbh.
The thoughts that come from drug tweaked brains are always slightly off. Sometimes though not usually, the thoughts are unique in a novel and attractive way. For creative thinking, dosing on something may be effective but I doubt it's healthy.
There are of course brilliant artists who are nuts, many of whose work I admire. But most high-performing people I know seem to be pretty “normal” and disciplined.
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 back awake retaining some of that state you just fell into, or any insights sprung into mind during that state.
I'm sure everyone's had mornings where they woke up after dreaming but without feeling quite awake—it's related to that feeling that they'd chase.
Maybe someone has a link on hand to a better write-up about it. I don't.
The gist (as I was taught it) is that when generating ideas, you separate things into two phases.
In the first phase, you focus solely on coming up with a lot of ideas. And here's the key part: during this phase, you avoid all judgment, evaluation, and negative thinking (maybe even excessive positive thinking) about ideas. If you're trying to generate ideas that solve a problem, for example, you don't worry about whether it will work. Just write it down.
In the second phase, you then go through and evaluate which ideas are good and bad. Many of them won't make sense, and of course you toss those out, but it's good that they're on the list because it confirms you did it right.
I think doing it this way this gains you two things. One, in the first phase, you stay focused on idea generation. Every moment your brain is occupied in evaluating merits is a moment your brain is not working on creating ideas. It's very easy to get sidetracked exploring an idea in depth. Avoiding evaluation helps ensure you actually allocate time to idea generation.
Two, it helps emotionally. Judgment, even if done constructively and in good faith, tends to kill the moment/mood (which is relatively fragile), whether it is self-judgment or from others. Coming up with ideas feels good and you get a little emotional reward as you create them. But negative thoughts or responses tend to make you want to hold back. Last time you offered (to yourself or someone else) an idea, it was partly a negative experience, so why repeat that?
You can do the two-phase thing individually in your own head or in groups.
Practically speaking, this isn't necessarily easy to do in groups. Many people already have preconceived notions about how brainstorming or idea generation is supposed to work, and it's hard to get them to try a new way or understand the difference between this and how they normally do it. Also, some people have trouble sticking to it. Sometimes because of impatience or wanting to look smart, but also because evaluating later can give you a feeling that you'll forget an important thought if you don't express it now.
I even started a technical blog:
But I may not be poor enough anymore to continue writing it.
BTW any interesting tech talks, meetups etc. you can recommend?
I recall from someone in the field in art therapy who discussed with me the difference between being artistic and being creative. Being an artist implies the pursuit of technical mastery of a certain craft, whereas being creative is the ability to create novel ideas through various means. These certainly aren't mutually exclusive properties, as many of the legendary artists of the past are those who excelled in both.
Though it can feel discouraging to perceive that one lacks a natural affinity for either of these qualities (I tend to fall more into the creative side of things rather than artistic), this also gives rise to the long list of successful artistic/creative duos. For example, duos are pretty common in the webcomic community (Penny Arcade being the most obvious example).
It's good to strive to improve oneself, but should the right opportunity arise, working together with other people who can make up for those (perceived) shortcomings has at least as much potential as being a solo artist/creative. And being involved with a community can provide new insights which can lead to personal growth in creativity and mastery.
There is something floating around in your mind that you want others to experience. It might be an emotion or thought or aesthetic experience that you had and want others to share. It can even be "asymmetrical" in the sense that perhaps you yourself haven't had the experience but it's one you want someone else to have.
Craft is all about the "how" of art, and expression is about the "what" and the "why". Expression can be a way of connecting with people because what you feel or think becomes something they feel or think too.
If you have art that is all craft and no expression, it can be a little empty or dull. For example, a pianist who plays all the right notes but doesn't put any feeling into it. Art with all expression and no craft isn't always great either. If a painter wants to capture the beauty of a person's face but can't draw noses, the effect probably won't be beauty.
For me, anything that makes me a little tired so my thoughts wander. Sitting down after a hard workout for example. Another is that time at the end of the day where I worked hard so I'm a bit tired, but I'm not so tired that it's time to sleep yet. I also have to allow it to happen. Sitting down in front of the PS4 or on my phone is not going to let my mind wander.
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.
If the solution was obvious, where's the problem?
Yeah, this was a bit was odd. IMO, problem solving begins with 'divergent' thinking and only later converges toward a, or the, solution. A study like this hinges upon how variables like'divergent thinking' were quantified, and there were no examples given of how they tested for either style of thinking here.
I found I did get better (or at least much faster) at recognizing subproblems and quickly composing an overall solution, even if none of the steps was particularly creative.
After about 3 weeks I had to ditch the coffee, I was getting too addled.
(Not a controlled experiment, of course, just conveying my impression of the experience).
After a day or two of that level of caffeine intake, I go into an almost trance of productivity and performance. It feels like I'm watching myself do what I need to do, not that I have to 'do it' myself. It's a very strange sensation. It's the same sensation I get when I'm 'in the zone' and competing in something with 100% of my focus on it (emotionally engaged, you might say).
I don't get into that state anywhere close to as easy without caffeine. I've been off caffeine for about 4-5 months now and I've noticed a change. My productivity isn't worse in any measurable way, but it feels different. I wish I could describe it in more relatable terms but I have nothing I can really relate it to.
(Cacao did this to me, btw, after I consumed a ton of it one time. Theobromine -- scuffed caffeine; caffeine without a methyl group that hardly passes the blood-brain barrier! I don't want to think about how that much ACTUAL caffeine would feel...)
I might be abnormal (people I live and work with certainly think so!), but I basically never feel 'tired.' I go from feeling 100% to "I need to sleep." This has remained true even after I cut out caffeine, so I can't really relate to how you describe working while tired.
The only negative thing is that I often work until right before I need to sleep, so if I'm drinking something mindlessly while working I end up waking up in the night once.
Caffeine boosts problem-solving ability and shows no sign of altered creativity.
Consider e.g. a concert pianist (interpreting a score) or a visual artist (choosing paint, brushstrokes).
It is nice to have a more scientific basis to back that up, though.
Also first time seeing my alma mater on HN :)
For problem solving, dwell on the problem in its domain just before bedtime, and make sure it's the last thing on your mind as you settle down into sleep. Let the subconscious have sole access to your understanding of the problem overnight.
Everybody's built different, but these work for me.
Has an interesting side effect of screwing with threshold of movement, particularly finger movement.
I play rhythm games (sifac, llsif, deresute, mirishita...) regularly and tried modafinil. My fingers wouldn't auto-move anymore, and furthermore even if I moved them consciously, it took more effort to do so.
At everything else, it puts caffeine to shame, with no tolerance buildup or withdrawal symptoms.
Though I still prefer caffeine. Hey, why not have both?
Btw, caffeine is an anticholinergic; too many or too much of this class of compounds leads to dementia and other permanent problems. Anecdotal example: ex-stepfather abused diphenhydramine, had a personality change and acted erratically... he eventually gave up, left my semi-disabled mom without any notice, just an email.
That seems to randomize and reorganize your brain cells, that you start to think of weird things that you would’ve never thought of otherwise.