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> brains consume so little energy doing continuous high complexity tasks Do they? While I've read that there's not a lot of difference between just chilling an

> brains consume so little energy doing continuous high complexity tasks Do they? While I've read that there's not a lot of difference between just chilling and thinking of some hard problem (not sure if true, though - haven't really dug to verify), thinking is thinking, so I guess that makes sense. But when e.g. a reaction time is important, I suspect, it could be quite energy-hungry. I mean, my watch sends me that I have elevated heart rate when I'm playing any fast-paced videogames, and I guess all that blood pumping surely has some biological reason (supplying more oxygen or something) and isn't just for funsies. I'm not a biologist, so this is purely based on my own observations and stuff I've heard somewhere.

eric-hu 2y ago
> While I've read that there's not a lot of difference between just chilling and thinking of some hard problem I find that difficult to reconcile with chess grandmaster calorie consumption. https://www.npr.org/2019/09/18/762046422/the-chess-grandmasters-diet https://www.npr.org/2019/09/18/762046422/the-chess-grandmast... > Polard, this company that tracks heart rates, monitored chess players during a tournament and found out that this 21-year-old Russian grandmaster, Mikhail Antipov, had burned 560 calories in two hours, which we found out was roughly what Roger Federer would burn in one hour of singles tennis.
- caseyy 2y ago
  I notice this in software engineering, too. Challenging problems drain brainpower quicker. I was working on difficult SOTA stuff for the last few months, half of it was reading articles and half was implementing them in software. I’d crash by 3.30-4 pm every day unless I had an extra meal around then. Lost 5 kilos, too. So it wasn’t all going into my waistline. You can observe this, I think. Drivers too tend to make more mistakes if they don’t eat well on long drives.

eric-hu 2y ago

> While I've read that there's not a lot of difference between just chilling and thinking of some hard problem I find that difficult to reconcile with chess grandmaster calorie consumption. https://www.npr.org/2019/09/18/762046422/the-chess-grandmasters-diet https://www.npr.org/2019/09/18/762046422/the-chess-grandmast... > Polard, this company that tracks heart rates, monitored chess players during a tournament and found out that this 21-year-old Russian grandmaster, Mikhail Antipov, had burned 560 calories in two hours, which we found out was roughly what Roger Federer would burn in one hour of singles tennis.

caseyy 2y ago
I notice this in software engineering, too. Challenging problems drain brainpower quicker. I was working on difficult SOTA stuff for the last few months, half of it was reading articles and half was implementing them in software. I’d crash by 3.30-4 pm every day unless I had an extra meal around then. Lost 5 kilos, too. So it wasn’t all going into my waistline. You can observe this, I think. Drivers too tend to make more mistakes if they don’t eat well on long drives.