
Breakfast is Overrated - jeff18
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/breakfast_is_overrated/
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anon-e-moose
This ignores all research already done on the brain and nutrition, and also
common sense. Its pretty well understood that the brain runs on glucose. Now
of course if you eat too much or eat shitty food, you're going to have an
insulin spike and sugar crash, and if you're eating too much you probably have
other health problems that aren't helping.

Healthy eating, good body weight, and regular exercise sharpens the brain.

Edit: The number of people jumping on board with this "theory" in his blog
comments makes me despair for the state of nutrition and health education.

Learn you a physiology: <http://www.fi.edu/learn/brain/carbs.html>

~~~
napierzaza
I'll probably be voted down for this, but Scott Adams is constantly making
unfounded and usually wrong statements on his blog. He tries to push out big
ideas on his blog and usually overreaches. But he has a big following.

~~~
smithbits
Has anyone got a convenient phrase for this style of blogging? I love having
these kinds of BS sessions with my friends, propounding crack-pot theories and
generally playing fast and loose with the facts, but it often bugs me when I
see it in a blog post. There's absolutely no reason it should bug me, blogging
is whatever the blogger wants it to be, but I think if I had a name for it I
could quickly go "Oh, this is just a [blank] post" and not feel the need to
take it seriously. Sort of like the way Godwin's law helps you filter the
worst comment threads into /dev/null. I bet it would be all kinds of fun to
have dinner with Scott Adams, I just don't want to mentally peer review his
after-dinner conversation.

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dgallagher
I'll throw this one out there: "Barstool Blogging"

It's like conversations you have with some random person in the barstool
section of a bar. Subject matter varies, but generally it ends with you both
talking like "experts" about some random subject neither of you really knows
much about, besides maybe a few "factoids" here and there.

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wccrawford
By his same logic, breakfast should be essential, provided you don't eat a
large breakfast.

You need to be on the edge of hunger to be creative, not into full-blown
hunger. Eat a small breakfast and you'll start to get hungry before lunch. Eat
a reasonable lunch, and you'll start to get hungry before dinner, etc.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>Eat a small breakfast and you'll start to get hungry before lunch. Eat a
reasonable lunch, and you'll start to get hungry before dinner

I usually go without breakfast (only coffee). When I do eat it then I'm
ravenous by lunchtime. I put it, completely unscientifically, down to waking
up your metabolism. Breakfast for me would be cereal of some sort with raisins
and milk or granola with milk.

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pdx
I found this interesting and appreciate people who think about things instead
of regurgitating what "experts" say with a pompous little whine in their
voice.

In this case, however, I wonder what is the tail and what is the dog. For me,
when I'm in the zen of creating something, I can't be bothered to take time to
eat. So, I am hungry when I'm creative, but I've always assumed it was an
effect, not a cause.

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seigenblues
While i don't buy his explanation of the causal mechanism at work, he's almost
perfectly described my work cycle: I'm most productive in the morning, get the
usual post-lunch valley, and have a nice productivity rise after my (usually
light) dinner. I'm also stick thin. It's so stark that i usually will put off
lunch as long as possible, and try to schedule meetings/etc for the 3p-6pm
area. I always assumed this was a side effect of being really involved, like
pdx writes, but maybe i had causality backwards.

I know the plural of anecdote isn't data, but i'm volunteering to be a
datapoint :)

Also, w.r.t. the eagerness to write off how half-baked Scott Adams is: There's
empirical observations of a black box, and there's the attempt to explain
what's inside. You might get causality backwards, or explain the correct
behavior in the wrong way, but who cares if the real goal is to maximize the
behaviors of the box, right? I mean, who cares if the explanation for putting
off lunch is ridiculous, as long as the behaviors it explains really exist.

[edit to clarify -- i don't really care if his explanation is accurate. He so
accurately described my mental cycles and my diet that it was interesting to
read his hypothesis]

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StavrosK
I know he said it's not scientific, but what dreck. _Even if_ the premise
holds, it's more likely that creative people are too busy creating to eat...

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Evgeny
Not quite relevant, but I do not have a practice of skipping breakfast. I am
_trying_ however, once in a week or two, to fast for 24-36 hours. This is
called "intermittent fasting" and has been shown to produce positive effects.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting> has some links to studies.

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seanalltogether
I don't know if this is a creativity trait, maybe more to do with addictive
personalities. The addiction I feel and the lack of food I experience when I'm
in a marathon coding session feels exactly the same as when I was trying to
tackle some epic dungeon in World of Warcraft. Hunger would end up fueling the
addictive focus I was feeling in both cases.

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samatman
The key may be in the casual mention of 'coffee consumption'.

Many creative caffeine users do their best work while all jacked on caffeine.
I know I do. That's often first thing in the morning, and sometimes even
before I eat. Caffeine is anorexic, as well, causing loss of appetite as part
of the effect.

It's still a better idea to eat. Many years ago, when I took prescription
amphetamines, I would force myself to eat at noon, grimly and efficiently
munching down a sandwich or burrito. Otherwise I would start hating life.

Normally, I eat a piece or two of fruit with tea for breakfast, followed by
second breakfast (often a bagel with hummus and avocado) a few hours later.
This gets me through the creative rush I think Scott's referring to, without
the obligatory post-lunch hard crash.

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samd
Breakfast _may be_ overrated, pending double-blind, randomized, placebo-
controlled studies corroborated by multiple, independent research teams.

~~~
drdo
While those studies are useful, you can't argue with results, even if you have
only tested it on yourself, it at least is true for you, even if you don't
fully understand the mechanism.

~~~
anon-e-moose
This seems reasonable, until you consider that there might be other factors at
play. Maybe he eats food that is hard to digest or causes a sugar rush and
then sugar crash, and simply not riding the sugar roller coaster felt better,
but he'd feel the same or even better by eating meals with less simple
carbohydrates.

The point of these studies is to remove these other factors and test one thing
at a time.

~~~
drdo
Then you have only proven that not eating results in feeling better than
eating exactly what you used to, keeping everything else the same, not that
not eating is better than eating independently of what you eat.

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VladRussian
Human brain, being a very recent, and thus highly un-tuned, product of
evolutionary development, is very energy inefficient machine. It consumes
disproportionally significant amount of resources when it really works. Thus
highly creative brain activity quickly burns through glucose and may quickly
make you feel hungry (please don't mistake with a pure psychological trick of
switching to snack in situations when your brain is forced to work intensely,
and it tries every escape route to avoid/delay the task )

~~~
gwern
Energy inefficient?

You have no idea what you are talking about. Estimates for how much
computation a human brain is doing _start_ at 10^14 flops and only go up from
there (Kurzweil, known for his optimism, puts the brain at 10^16). Current
record-holding supercomputers, BTW, are just barely at 10^15 or so.

And the brain does this on a watt or two, not 1.3 megawatts
(<http://www.top500.org/lists/2008/06/highlights/power>).

~~~
icegreentea
Voted the OP back up, cause I think it's really just a poor choice of diction.
The brain DOES consume a lot of your body's total energy budget. Like roughly
20% when resting, and it goes up when thinking harder [1]. Granted, compared
to supercomputers, we might have godly energy efficiency, but when our source
of power isn't a 240V outlet, but food, then we have to evaluate the actual
energy consumption a bit different.

[1] <http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/JacquelineLing.shtml>

~~~
VladRussian
thanks for the link.

"Einstein's brain weighed only 1,230 grams, which is less than the average
adult male brain (about 1,400 grams). .... However, the density of neurons in
Einstein's brain was greater. In other words, Einstein was able to pack more
neurons in a given area of cortex."

Personally for me, that completely confirms my theories. Moore's Law for the
brain :)

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mian2zi3
This is summed up in the old adage, "The hungry hound hunts best."

~~~
fharper1961
Hey, I didn't know that one, thanks!

The equivalent French saying has a bit more more innuendo...

    
    
      "A good rooster is never fat"

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trustfundbaby
I think its an interesting piece, but his leaps of logic are a bit alarming
... in a funny sort of way.

I just think that people who are creative or actively creating stuff don't
have time to eat much or sleep for that matter.

Not to put myself in that category, but I often forget to eat and when I do, I
wolf down my food so I can get on to more 'interesting' things ... also ...
sleeping annoys me ... it seems like such an inefficient way of recharging my
body/brain (inactivity for 30% of the day ... wtf?!?!), at one point I'd only
get 5 hours of sleep because it felt like such a waste of time ... after
having some health issues because of it, I'm closer to 6/7 now ...

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radioactive21
For me this is true. Again, can't speak for everyone, but for myself I eat
when I am hungry, but never over eat. I dont eat breakfast unless im hungry,
and I eat in moderation.

Not trying to yank anyone's chain, but I know people who make a huge deal out
of breakfast. They make a huge meal out of it, from which they also add a
large lunch and diner, and then question why they cant lose weight.

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geoffc
The old saying "hungry dog hunts best" sums it up as was already pointed out
in another comment. The hungrier I get the sharper my focus becomes, whether
it is writing code or hunting, it works!

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jasondavies
"Yond' Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are
dangerous." -- Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

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aho
Is it possible that digestion uses resources that could otherwise be used for
thinking?

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slowpoison
I have my creativity spikes when I'm feeding on a specific source of calories
- beer!

~~~
electromagnetic
I'm about 270lb construction worker. I have never seen a design in my life. At
15 I got a job as a reviewer because I lived in the sticks I couldn't get
anywhere to work to be able to pay for video games and movies - plus I was too
overweight and lazy to be up to do a paper route. I did however use ingenuity
and talent to start writing reviews, getting free games and movies and trading
for what I wanted.

I worked as an electrician at 17 with a licensed electrician. We never did new
construction so all our work was after-fact and involved a ton of creative
work arounds (I was like 200+lbs, you think I'm crawling in loft space in the
eave of a house? No fucking way - genius kicks in fast). I currently work
doing siding, windows, soffit and eavestrough. Not only do you have to be able
to make your own cappings, but our instructions are literally - "[x] inch
insulation, and [x] type siding" for a full house with windows, vents, gas and
hydro stacks, pipes, and all sorts to work around. Seen a badly sided house?
It looks horrible, and worse you get leaks in your house.

I'm 22, in 5 years the only thing I'm unsure about doing in making a house is
the foundation. I've done everything else or know I can without a doubt
without ever doing it - roofing for example, cover your nails and stagger,
I've worked with roofers and they literally aren't that smart. If you can't
roof - find a god and pray for help.

In my free time I still write, on a nearly daily basis. Either blogging, or
working on a novel or short stories. This writing is usually fed with beer,
sometimes rum, always a sugary liquid like pepsi or coke on my non-alcohol
nights. I'd feed my other work with booze if I could, but a drunk guy up a
32ft ladder is a _bad_ idea.

I think creativity involves the ability to jump to tools you barely know and
to still excel.

