> The change in clarity of mind and focus were life changing to me.
Feeling smart != being smart. I was once doing a water fast for a week and felt rather enlightened after a few days, like any problem would be easy. Upon trying to churn on some more advanced math proofs and programming stuff, it seemed to actually be harder than it would usually be. In fact I quickly decided that my time would be better spent walking around outside in the woods.
Fasting isn't really the same as keto of course. But I wonder if there are actual studies proving an increase in problem solving skills during something like a ketogenic diet or similar.
Like many psychedelic users can attest to. The mindset of enlightenment is just another mindset that can be produced by the brain by doing the appropriate actions
For me, I get drunk and I start to feel really smart and enlightened, however next day I usually cringe, but who knows maybe it was the drunk me that was the smart one and the cringing me is just too narrow minded and judgmental.
The sober mind has been trained to carefully construct grammatically flawless sentences for the teacher. Hence the sober mind is hesitant, fearful and prone to second guessing itself.
The drunk mind he knows it not matter. Tempo and rhythm importanter. No stopping. Know not how conjugate don't conjugate. Not remember word loan other lingua. Say story no stopping manier words is gooder.
I found that I had to get over feeling like I was mocking a foreign accent, before I could become even passably-for-someone-bad-at-it good at an accent for the one other language I've ever tried to semi-seriously learn. In fact, leaning into "mocking" it was the fastest way to improve. I bet that it's easier to get past that perceived faux-pas when a few drinks in....
I'm pretty sure a drunk mind can read what you commented with ease and get the point, while a sober mind would get stuck and think "what is this" and do multiple takes before getting the point.
I can confirm. While visiting Russia and having a few drinks with friends, I could understand everything perfectly even though my vocabulary was just a few words! Just kidding of course but we seemed to be understanding each other really well and later when everybody was sober, we recalled it being a good time.
That. Joscha Bach pretty much summarized the problem with just one word: Overfitting. I've since spotted the pattern several times. People going all in on psychedelics, seeing them as the solution to almost everything. Leary and McKenna starting a cult. Esp. McKenna and the true hallucination story make it pretty obvious that these two brothers overdid it so much that they couldn't just leave it behind, they had to follow up and supposedly go deep on that stuff.
I think if you're curious about this sort of thing you have to go the route of the gnostic and try to experience it for yourself (the bidirectional link between your actions and your mental state, I mean). Meditation is one approach, drugs another. Perhaps in the future we'll have the tools to study this stuff more quantitatively, but for now the mind seems to be mostly mystery to science?
I'm interested in why it's become normalized for people to know the unknowable, and a lot of those afflicted are scientists. Plus, I don't see science making a lot of progress on the front.
Hmm, maybe I'm not sure what you mean about people knowing the unknowable? To me, whether something is unknowable or not is a property that can change over time as technology/epistemology develops. On the other hand there have always been (and probably will always be) people making confident assertions about things they don't know for certain. Getting at some sort of truth is an uncommon goal for monkeys =).
No disagreement from me about science making progress on the mind.
> On the other hand there have always been (and probably will always be) people making confident assertions about things they don't know for certain.
Here's how it works: "Oh, that is just...".
Ignore billions of these per day in the system, and you get what we constantly complain about but don't know how it came to be. Science developed a method to deal with this phenomenon that works quite well, but it is only applied in very narrow domains.
At certain scale, systems no longer appear as systems.
> Feeling smart != being smart. I was once doing a water fast for a week and felt rather enlightened after a few days, like any problem would be easy. Upon trying to churn on some more advanced math proofs and programming stuff, it seemed to actually be harder than it would usually be.
Exactly. Often touted for silly reasons, but it's definitely 100% true: feelings are not facts. Feeling healthier does not mean you are healthier. Feeling clearer does not mean you are clearer, etc.
I can't say I get smarter, but I have very vivid memories of after-fasting days, and in the morning it was really easy to focus on anything I would choose to focus on, the mind would be extremely concentrated and still.
Your body requires nutrients to function. Deliberately depriving your cells of those nutrients can't possibly be good for them and likely does them harm. You evolved to survive such catastrophes of course, but the key word is "survive".
What states of mind can be induced by fasting is a separate consideration, it seems to me.
I don't think deprivation is the right model. Cells are still getting nutrients, just from different sources, particularly fat. Animals have 500 millions of years of evolutionary experience using this energy source.
I would be more concerned about the harm caused by not using this metabolic pathway, at least occasionally.
Fat itself is a nutrient [1], providing one of the most important bodily requirements of energy. The body requires other nutrients as well, and has methods of storing them. Fasting does not mean going without them. The nutrients of most interest to fasting are probably essential amino acids which can not be synthesized and ionic electrolytes.
Free protein and amino acids only last a couple days in the body before being used for muscle or being irreversibly converted to fat. When necessary, the body can break down muscle to obtain essential amino acids.
The relevant electrolytes the body needs are sodium, potassium, and magnesium, which it maintains fairly deep stores of in the bones.
Feeling smart != being smart. I was once doing a water fast for a week and felt rather enlightened after a few days, like any problem would be easy. Upon trying to churn on some more advanced math proofs and programming stuff, it seemed to actually be harder than it would usually be. In fact I quickly decided that my time would be better spent walking around outside in the woods.
Fasting isn't really the same as keto of course. But I wonder if there are actual studies proving an increase in problem solving skills during something like a ketogenic diet or similar.