3 ms·

This must be directly from the "No Shit, Sherlock" Department

• mhb 11y ago
  Especially since it's from 2009.
• jacobolus 11y ago
  You saw the headline, but you might have missed the second sentence of the abstract: “Although the impact of mental fatigue on cognitive and skilled performance is well known, its effect on physical performance has not been thoroughly investigated.” Even if the overall idea is obvious, these effects are good to validate and quantify. For instance, this is a bit less obvious: “[...] physiological responses to intense exercise remained largely unaffected. Self-reported success and intrinsic motivation related to the physical task were also unaffected by prior cognitive activity. [...] our study provides experimental evidence that mental fatigue limits exercise tolerance in humans through higher perception of effort rather than cardiorespiratory and musculoenergetic mechanisms.” It would be interesting to do follow-up studies with larger groups of participants to figure out how much variation there is in the effect between different people, or whether there are any ways to reduce the subjective impression of effort to mitigate the apparent throttling effect of mental fatigue. * * * The paper has been cited nearly 300 times in the past 6 years, so it’s probably not completely useless. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=957481530281065221&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=957481530281065221&...
• dang 11y ago
  Please don't post drive-by dismissals to Hacker News. Even if you're right and the article is worthless, it degrades the quality of the discussions here and signals the wrong things. And if you're wrong, i.e. if the article has value and you missed it, then you're really damaging the thread. In such a case, please either flag the article and move on, or post something substantive about its specifics.