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Why we're more creative at night and how to reproduce the effect
- miobrien 10y agoInteresting article. Hits home for me. I've honestly struggled with this for years. I've always been a night owl. As a young adult, I managed to get away with it; my family and friends would often called me "lazy" or a "late sleeper" but I always pointed out that, although I woke up at 11, I went to bed at 4, so it's not like I'm sleep for 12 hours at a time. However, as an adult, it's challenging; I have to get up early for work or school, but I crave the late-night dives into my thoughts. Also, it's not that I necessarily like being alone—I wouldn't call myself a solitary person—but I find that the night is also productive and fertile time because there are fewer distractions: once everyone's asleep I can work undisturbed; for me there's something calming about the night/early morning.
- satysin 10y agoI am exactly the same. Even now at 33 (birthday today in fact!) my most productive and creative hours are from 9pm until 3am. My mind is sharper at that time and I have no idea why. I have tried every thing I have heard of to make myself a morning person but nothing works. Measuring my sleep cycles, getting 8, 9 or even 10 hours sleep a night, diet changes, etc, etc. Nothing gets my brain to that natural super sharp level. Very strange but I just work with it as best I can. That is hard with a 4 year old though.
- tmikaeld 10y agoHappy birthday :)
- satysin 10y agoThank you very much :) The weather is lovely in West London today so we have been out teaching my son to ride his bike. Now I am relaxing with an ice cold soft drink and this evening I have been promised a few hours uninterrupted gaming haha. Living the dream!
- rossy 10y ago> Not too many, of course, because the more you drink the less other critical thinking functions have to keep going. The trick is to drink just the right amount of alcohol. Ah, the mythical Ballmer Peak[1]. [1]: https://xkcd.com/323/ https://xkcd.com/323/
- devoply 10y agoCongratulations, you are a creative alcoholic, now what?
- pasta 10y agoA lot of people use some kind of drugs to get creative, but as the article points out: you can train this by learning to set aside thoughts that block the creative process (simple thoughts like: "this is probably not possible"). Alcohol might help some times but as with every drugs: it's a loan. You have to repay it some time. Most of the time in the form of exhaustion. Also: sometimes creativity without boundries is't interesting anymore because it has become too chaotic. So maybe some boundries are always needed.
- marak830 10y agoI find even as a chef I have kept the same habits as when programming. When I on my kitchen at 10am, I'm a pure zombie, give me my coffee, let me prep and get the hell out of my way. But 8-9pm when I'm cleaning up , yeah I start getting more creative then (infact I designed my new waygu nori Maki last night from that), and when I'm at home, I'll still be thinking about recipes and jotting down notes to test and try during my zombie hours. "Exhaustion, it appears, can spur creativity because, frankly, you just don’t give a damn." This i can agree with. At the moment I'm short a chef, so I'm pulling 12-14 hour shifts every day. By Sunday(day 6), pretty worn out, but I find myself more willing to try crazy combinations.
- joveian 10y agoShould anyone else come accross this article at this point, be aware that the author is seriously confused about how the brain works. Quite possibly every single biological claim in the article is either seriously misleading or outright incorrect. For easy to confirm evidence of this, attempt to find support in the one reference cited for the statement that it is cited as a reference for.
- tannerc 10y agoHi, author here! Thanks for flagging. Despite the article being four years old—I'd like to think I've come a way in terms of better referencing reliable sources since then—there is evidence in the reference cited that speaks directly to the claim, but you would have to stretch yourself to uncover it. Or you could just Google it I guess. e.g. the claim from the article: "Your [pre]frontal cortex happens to be a major dopamine hub...it's the hub for processing dopamine" is formed from the association of dopamine's function within the frontal lobe; namely, and from the source, how depletion of it has been identified as a major hinderance to abilities stemming from that area of the brain. Of course the all-reliable (/s) Wikipedia also tells us: "The frontal lobe contains most of the dopamine-sensitive neurons in the cerebral cortex." Dopamine certainly plays a major part in that region of the brain, again a Google search yields enough on the subject to warrant a statement of the variety I originally made.
- joveian 10y agoI did notice it is an old article, however the citation is not correct and defending it makes me think you could still use some work in that area. The paragraph with the citation discusses the relative importance of dopamine to the frontal lobe vs. the rest of the brain. The article you cite does not address that, not even in a side comment as far as I can tell. Independent of the citation, I think it is misleading to call the whole frontal lobe (or even prefrontal cortex) a "hub" although reasonable to note the significance of dopamine there. The second sentence I consider factually incorrect considering the major role dopamine has in the striatum (also "processing dopamine" doesn't really describe what you are talking about). As tempting as it is, connecting brain structure and functioning to human experience is more likely to be misleading than accurate and particularly so the shorter the explanation is (no matter how well researched and explained). Making such claims in this type of article is misrepresenting scientific knowledge and I encourage you to avoid doing so (as popular as this is :( ).