If one is overeating, or eating garbage all the time, then I'd hypothesize fasting to be beneficial by giving the biological system a break to try and bring itself back to a better steady-state without so much forced external input.

Changes in thickness have been found even when comparing people scanned in the morning and in the evening [1]. Any drug intervention could be expected to cause physiological changes that could act as confounds. Also, in the discussion one reads: "Interestingly, no lasting effects of combined oral contraceptives (COCs) use were detected when comparing the four groups." This suggests that the changes could be driven by physiological changes instead of permanent changes in brain circuitry.

It would be great to see a follow up study controlling for potential confounding effects (for example, measuring baseline perfusion, blood pressure and controlling for time of day effects and usage of other drugs), and expanding the study with functional tests that involve fear regulation.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381191...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35283459

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"Get some weights. Pick up the weights. Put down the weights. Eat healthy food." There is no real secret. No need for a gym to do those.

But now more seriously - I'd suggest just getting a pull up bar. You can then do pull-ups in addition to push-ups, squats and some core work, and that'll hit all of the main muscle groups. You can do that at home.

Staying at a plateau for a while is sometimes great to avoid injury.

Being actually productive (quality > quantity), I argue, is a process that takes physical time. Absorbing information, internalizing it, and summarizing it with our own understanding requires a lot of energy. This process cannot be massively accelerated. Same as with physical fitness, one can operate close to optimum and see and maintain great results, but one cannot operate better than optimum given one's own physical constraints.

For intelectual work, defining what "operating close to optimum" means is much harder because the quantity of output is usually the metric, and that varies so much from discipline to discipline and person to person. I believe many of us are already operating close to optimum (reading and writing, attending meetings, presenting our work), so there is no point in investing even more towards productivity. But the falacy is that because we don't have a proper metric for productivity, we believe investing even more is worthwhile since it increases output, and so we perceive ourselves as better.

I don't see AI changing the picture for us because the problem is not what we are doing, but how we perceive to be doing it. That's what's up with tools for thought and personal wikis.

The falacy comes, I believe, from the combination of two facts: 1. much of the intellectual work we do these days simply takes time. No amount of writing can accelerate that beyond our biological limit of learning, so we might as well just sit and think. 2. Just sitting and thinking is considered unproductive and regarded as lazyness, so we believe we should be writing even more instead.

In that regard, using tools for thought may be pointless, since all we need is time to think. But perhaps that pointlessness serves a purpose. Like a guardrail in a highway, tools for thought are not something we "really need", but they're there to at least keep us on track in case we were to drift away while our minds move forward.