Hacker News Reader

Comment by ravi-delia | Hacker News Reader

See this is why I get annoyed at a body evolved for caloric scarcity. We shouldn't get tired, we should get hungry! Oh, pollutants build up in the brain? Burn more energy to get rid of them! I should be able to strap an icepack to my head, fill a bottle with olive oil, and overclock my brain to 10x speed.

View on HN

> we should get hungry

Personally, it does! Working hard makes me hungry, also tired, but less so if I eat well. I obviously can't overclock my brain as you describe, but there is definitely a link.

Speaking of overclocking, that's what bats do. Flight takes up a lot of energy, so they have evolved systems to deal with all the byproducts, including toxic chemicals. Interestingly, this is also why they have no problem carrying what for us are deadly viruses: overclocking results in cell damage, something that bats are equipped to deal with, but it would also trigger inflammation, so bats have damped their inflammation response, but that would leave them vulnerable to infection, so they evolved a faster immune response that is able to outpace the virus, and when one of these viruses jump to humans, they have time to reproduce a lot before our immune system reacts causing a massive inflammation that ends up doing more damage than the virus itself.

I wonder if bats get a lot of allergy problems

They get deadly nose infections by fungi... Not a great trade.

I get sleepy when I eat

I once had the same problem. That usually means unhealthy diet and constant eating and lack of exercise that all result in huge insulin spikes and insulin resistance.

Try 16/8 intermittent fasting and a healthier, more balanced diet and walking for a few minutes after meals and you will feel like a new person. After meals you will feel energized and awake.

Just a note that there are common conditions like postprandial hypotension[1] (or various other types of hypotension) where what you want is more, smaller meals.

The way a doctor explained it to me is blood rushes to the digestive system after we eat and, while normally bodies compensate for that via increased blood pressure (vasoconstriction and heart rate increase), for some people that process doesn't work well and they get a blood pressure drop instead.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/biomedgerontology/article/60/10/126...

Good point. To me it doesn't really matter if I do 2 large meals or 5 small ones. With the "constant eating" I meant the duration and not the frequency.

I feel sleepy after meals, but if I go for a brisk walk not long after the meal, I start to feel extremely faint.

I eat well and do 16/8. By eat well, an example is a heavy salad, arugula, roast chicken, tomatoes, a bit of cheese, mushrooms, and croutons, light dressing. That's a lunch at 1p. By 2pm, I'm ready to slide under my desk for a nap.

A slightly different view - when I was doing psychedelic mushrooms few times long time ago, the whole experience feels like serious overclocking my brain. Not only expanding it breadth of perception many times (aka expanded consciousness), but also the unrelenting intensity at highest revs of all of it.

When coming down from the trip (which can take easily 2 hours itself), its always super pleasant and feels very meditative, and at the very end, massive exhaustion sets on. I mean mental exhaustion I luckily can't get to via any other way, even if I pull an intense all-nighter that's nothing compared to it.

Massive headache, feeling of burning out from inside, using every calorie available in bloodstream. Its the only headache for me on which normal weak freely available painkillers (paracetamol and ibuprofen-based) are not enough.

For whatever reason, hunger nor thirst never enters the picture, those emotions are completely blocked up there.

Or ... be smart about being smart!

Choose what problems you work on wisely. Make sure when you are getting paid, you are getting paid for familiar work (less tiring for the brain) and then use up your smart reserves on your side project, or for your friends/family or community or society.

One option is to be like an Electron app, throw more RAM at it and be busy, the other is to be like a native optimized app - get the same stuff achieved with less resources.

-O-

To address your burn more energy to get rid of pollutants. I wonder if a 20 minute nap has the same effect. It is the CPU equivalent of letting the overclocked CPU cool down. Rather than throwing energy at the problem (which means more work and chemical processing for a biological creature), just let the body run it's natural defrag cycle.

This is why I like this forum: Understanding brain biology with a Electron's app RAM consumption analogy.

Had the same thought. This really is the better Reddit for nerds.

no wonder this place is dying

Yeah, but after you've done all that, you still have room that you could do better with overclocking yourself.

Or...I could do all those things 10x faster and better by burning 10,000 calories a day, breathing pure oxygen, redirecting bloodflow to my brain (necessitating sitting in a chair), and running a 50 watt cooling system at all times. That's not necessarily the Electron app style, if you're already doing the best you can do your only option is MOAR POWER

I don't think energy is the limiting factor here. A better analogy would be with the limits of computability. Garbage collection tasks are postposed to when we're asleep, but they can only be put off for so long and there's a capacity for "stuff to consolidate later" that fills up.

Something that you probably could get is a nob to control the adaptability/efficiency setting on your brain. At the cast of learning/remembering nothing, you could "execute" for longer. We know that real brains make this trade off, but the transition from one mode to the other is slow because it's reactive.

> Garbage collection tasks are postposed to when we're asleep, but they can only be put off for so long and there's a capacity for "stuff to consolidate later" that fills up

Do we have a strong reason to believe that? I know brain and sleep mechanisms are tricky topics with lots of unknowns, but I thought I had read research that showed sleeping brains likely perform a chemical analogue to "garbage collection".

Indeed, it's called the glymphatic system. We evolved to have a circadian system that drains brain waste products during sleep. There are probably other unknown neurological consequences of sleep that remain to be detailed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glymphatic_system

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18115-2

It's not just us, as in humans. (Not saying you said otherwise.) Practically all animals sleep, even invertebrates like octopuses.

Even spiders do: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/spiders-may-sleep-and-dream-lik....

It's unlikely for sleep to only do one thing. At a minimum it reduces caloric expenditures and accumulation of damage or risk through activity. It also allows time to heal injuries without the need for inflammation to immobilize the area.

Really lack of movement is probably useful and harmful for all kinds of things. REM sleep probably has some brain benefits but moving the eyes may relate to circulating fluid within the eye etc etc.

Microsleep is a GC pause.

In addition to the chemical ones others discussed, there is informational "garbage collection" as well. There are a bunch of motor tasks that only show certain types improvement after sleep - not time, sleep. There are also rodent studies where you can do a learning task and then "clear" part of their hippocampus using optogenetics. If you clear it before sleep, they forget what they "learned" if you clear it after sleep they still remember it. Again, multiple clever conditions to control for time and separate it from sleep.

Dolphins are better adapted to this as they can turn off half their brain (and vice versa) while still functioning and alert for up to 15 days straight.

Would be interesting if one day we could induce or evolve to have similar capabilities.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dolphins-sleep-wit...

I hope our environment doesn’t become so adverse that we need to evolve that capability but little do we know about the human of the future, whether it will even be our ancestor or a complete different species.

The human of the future will likely be a computer.

That makes as much sense as saying that they'll be a "steam engine."

Nice, Glutamate Garbage Collection.

It would frankly shock me if there wasn't some pricey but extant way to handle garbage collection more quickly. It would be laughably stupid to implement in a caloric desert, but I can't imagine there isn't some way to do time-sharing or a larger support network.

Hahaha that would be nice. But it likely demands a stock of varied nutrients, not just "energy". Also the cells changing need to take a break to consolidate what they have adapted to (brain plasticity).

> Also the cells changing need to take a break to consolidate what they have adapted to (brain plasticity).

I feel like this has got to be a problem solvable by throwing money at it. Not as is, most likely, but if we had evolved without caloric restriction there would be some kind of more complicated support structure which handles all that.

This feels like it may fall into the realm of "I think if we just throw money at it we could solve it" problems that you can't actually solve by throwing money at.

Metaphorical money thrown at evolution several million years ago, namely calories. You were built on a budget, just because it's still better than anything we could make doesn't mean it's the best evolution can do under lesser constraints

If we had no calorie restriction why would we have evolved.

underrated perspective

Something else would end up scarcer

In an energy-rich environment, evolution should select for faster and faster reproductive rates.

Perhaps so, but humans are reproducing later and having fewer offspring, so there are more variables than just energy.

Environmental stresses are well-known to cause reproduction rates to plummet. That can be because of a lack of available food, but it can really be any sort of stress.

That's true, we evolved to adapt to calorie scarcity but our environment has changed: calories are now abundant but our system is still optimized for scarcity despite that constraint no longer existing. I'm sure in a few thousand years that'll go away (possibly faster, as we get better at manipulating our own biology) but the status quo is that we're poorly adapted to our environments, energy-wise.

Excellent point.

But note that calories scarcity is a simplistic model.

What I'm trying to show with what I was saying, is that there are stocks of scarce molecules imposing performance limits too.

If we had evolved without caloric restriction in an "easy" energy-rich environment where there's less competition for scarce energy and thus complexity and intelligence aren't absolutely mandatory to acquire it, evolution should select for faster reproductive rates by simply sacrificing complexity, not building some kind of more complicated support structure.

Well yeah, obviously. It's just a dream after all

So the way to fight mental fatigue is to make sure you get rid of those pollutants, or make sure they don't build up so fast.

To get rid of pollutants, your body needs to drain them away through your vessels. For this system to work optimal, you should regularly exercise and avoid cholesterol-rich or inflammatory food that clogs your arteries. What could possibly also help is move around a bit to avoid overly tensed neck muscles.

Only semi related, but i wanted to install a USB jack in my belly button so i could charge my phone off my visceral fat, which seemed like a win-win. Probably best I didn't, though, because this predated usb-c...

Good point, but given there are neurons in the belly, would you be unable to process emotions or be in a really fancy mood after charging your phone?

Lol, more practically you could get something like this!

https://www.amazon.com/Zeus-Dynamo-Powerhouse-Crank-Generato...

Or, if you live in a cold climate, you could make a thermo-electric generator vest to wear around town.

Is there any ongoing development of implants to "burn" fat in-place, converting it to something more readily metabolized ? (glucose?)

You basically can do that. One of the limiting factors is your ability to metabolise energy sources into energy your body can use. Improve that by increasing your fitness and your cognitive ability will be improved as well.

> Burn more energy to get rid of them! I should be able to strap an icepack to my head, fill a bottle with olive oil, and overclock my brain to 10x speed.

Stimulants like methamphetamine do that don't they? I mean with other negative side-effects, of course, you'll feel like your brain is working 10x the speed.

Tough to get a stable overclock that way though.

Only because more 'feels' better, so you take more. And then, more still 'feels' better. If you only stick to doses you can't feel, it's long term reliable IMHE.

You might feel like you're doing 10x the work but it won't be 10x work

Haha fair

> See this is why I get annoyed at a body evolved for caloric scarcity. We shouldn't get tired, we should get hungry! Oh, pollutants build up in the brain? Burn more energy to get rid of them! I should be able to strap an icepack to my head

Well, you did identify the major problem with the unlimited overclocking plan. Burning more energy generates more heat. An icepack on the side of your head doesn't solve the problem; at some point your brain (and the rest of the inside of your head) will cook, which is fatal.

Imagining that we evolve cooling fins on our head for better heat dissipation. We already have the fluid circulation system after all.

Many of us have evolved a lack of hair on our heads, that's a first step right?

And the rest of us are capable of removing our hair (at least temporarily).

"Did you shave your head?" "Yeah, I have a big math exam coming up, so you know, I'm pulling out all the stops"

The scrotum can rise or fall based on the need for cooling. Can we concoct the genes that would allow our heads+brains to do the same ?

no, please. i don't want scrotum head

Sweating, especially on our head, is an adaptation like that that many mammals do not have but we do.

>Burning more energy generates more heat. An icepack on the side of your head doesn't solve the problem; at some point your brain (and the rest of the inside of your head) will cook, which is fatal.

I think they sell a fancy cooling device using water cooling on NewEgg that solves that problem. It has some wild lights though.

You can overclock it with Modafinil.

Guy at work used to put his hand over people's head to see if they were solving a problem or just staring at code. He was always able to tell. I prefer a kilo of cashews to a bottle of olive oil, but you can totally train your metabolism to utilize the fat. Some antioxidants from peppers or leaves into the mix and my brain doesn't get tired until its time to do some dreaming to unclog the stuck bad ideas.

>Oh, pollutants build up in the brain?

Perfect time to write some code to let it out. :d

Reply on news.ycombinator.com