The calculus of caffeine consumption | Hacker News Reader

The calculus of caffeine consumption

arvindn.livejournal.com

80 pointsrandomwalker16 comments

Intriguing headline and interesting content, but where's the calculus? I mean, not in terms of rates of changes and piecemeal and aggregated effects, but it was really all quite fuzzy.

Enjoyable nonetheless. Is it possible to get some sources? In particular, 2-3 weeks for tolerance build up, and 5 days to "adenosine normality"? 5 days is a surprisingly small figure, and I would guess there is a rebound effect if it's just a short relapse. No expert here though, but coffee is my buddy so I want to care :)

Actually, would it also be possible to get a source regarding the attentional fluctuation throughout the day?

Yeah, the post is pretty unscientific / unacademic as a whole, even though the results are reinforced by my own anecdotal observations.

Calculus is a pretty general term; the study of rates of change is a particular calculus. It's certainly the most common one, and so it is properly referred to as The Calculus.

All the numbers I reported are from papers on pubmed and stuff, most of which are linked to from the wikipedia article. I spent several hours reading and re-reading papers; I didn't cite them because my normal blog audience doesn't care. But yeah, you can verify everything by starting out on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine

Attention fluctuation -- look up biphasic sleep, or studies on the effectiveness of napping.

I'm looking through the sources and can't find a paper on tolerance buildup times nor rebound effects after abstinence. Alas, I only have access to abstracts right now :(

As for polyphasic sleep and napping, it is known that energy levels fluctuate cyclically throughout the day with two peaks, but I'm surprised that you plotted it with a sinusoidal curve that would suggest constant periods and surprisingly, constant amplitudes... of course, without axes the graphs don't say much of anything, but it's still a surprising presentation. You could justify it as being for a general audience, but it has significant risk of creating misconceptions, and weakens this article quite a bit.

By the way, one of the papers finds "Caffeine consumption for 4 weeks also significantly reduced hippocampal neurogenesis compared to controls." Which is not happy news for me.

For what it's worth, here's my own successful attempt at giving up caffeine: http://www.bricolagelabs.com/experiments/3-quitting-caffeine

It has day-by-day descriptions of symptoms etc. I was back to normal faster than expected, but I used certain strategies to help get there.

"Clearly, an idea that advances the state of the art is unlikely to occur except when attention level peaks."

I'm not at all sure this is true. Tales of apple tress, baths and monkeys (or was it snakes?) chasing tails come to mind. In my own personal experience I've had some of my best ideas in the shower or on the bus going home.

I could be wrong, but I think you might be confusing attentiveness with focus. I don't believe the author is saying that the best ideas are guaranteed to occur when you are at a peak focus on the problem, but rather when your mind is most attentive, in general.

That is simply my interpretation, though.

Indeed, this is not true. Sustained attention is necessary in certain types of problems, but those you would call "state of the art" encompasses something much broader.

The immediate example in my mind is the benzene ring story, conceived in a dream.

Anecdotal ramblings, spotty biochemistry, and a few fuzz charts. Edward Tufte would make a poignant chart describing the aneurysm he'd get from reading this.

That being said, I anecdotally agree with the thesis: Drink coffee to improve your natural strengths instead of trying to BigPharma more hours into the day.

Also remember that for the purposes of using caffeine to enhance productivity, the worst thing you can do is chug three cups in the morning. Instead, you want to drink your dose as slowly as possible throughout the period of time you want to be stimulated.

pseudoscience is the worst kind of "science".

its amazing how graphs and pretty rhetoric trick uneducated readers.

see: current HN post #1 -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=366857

What? Pseudoscience is junk that claims to be science. If I claimed that were science, I would have tried to get it published instead of writing a blog post.

I wrote the article a year and a half ago, and I've been living by it for 3-4 years now. It's worked out amazingly well. I wrote it in order to share my experience and thinking with other people.

Got a problem with that?

As for references, see my comment above.

Ignore the negative kickback. If you had a conversation with a friend about this kind of idea they would say you might be onto something. Write something on the web and suddenly people are complaining that your blog is not a peer-reviewed paper in a scientific journal.

On the topic itself, if you are really interested in improved creative task focus, whole-brain stimulants like caffeine are a sledgehammer approach.

hmm... correct.

my apologies, offense not intended, though looking back I can see that wasn't the nicest post by me. You didn't claim it was science and you're right it shouldn't be critiqued as such.

i AM a scientist by training, so sometimes the stuff i see on the internet people try to pass off as science perturbs me. i wrote that hastily after a quick read of the article and i confess i was out of line.

And you know what? I don't have a problem with it, and even if someone does, you should tell 'em to screw off. Worse than bad science, is when one person tries to prevent others from the act of content/idea creation. naysayers provide no value and you're right to be annoyed by my response. my initial response to your article wasn't intended to be in that spirit, so my bad, guy.

keep it up.

no worries.

i'm a scientist as well, look up my profile :)

since we've already established that i was out of line, i just thought i'd revisit this topic of pseudoscience vs science since:http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/11/18.html

currently (as of Nov 19, 7:40am CST) is the number one ranked post on HN.

I think it reflects both of our sentiments.

Incidentally, I went to UT Austin as well.

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