Hacker News Reader

Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

I've definitely noticed that staying up late (or similarly being awake after not getting enough sleep) harms memory recall, motor tasks, and concentration/logic.

But, lack-of-sleep also sometimes offers a slight euphoria or creativity/disinhibition in thinking. The mechanism might even be the same: certain parts of the brain that normally moderate mood or inhibit certain lines of thought fall asleep on their own. So, the remaining parts of the brain party.

View on HN

"When you get very very tired—and I had been up four nights all night long; Steve and I got mononucleosis—your head gets in this real creative state and it thinks of ideas that you'd normally just throw out. I came up with this idea of taking one little cheap (less than $1) part with 4 bits in it. If I spun it around at the right rate, the data that comes out of that chip looks like color TV. And I could put 16 different patterns and they all look like different colors, sort of. Would a digital signal that goes up and down actually work on a color TV the way there are sine waves and complicated calculus to develop how color TV was established in the television world? Would it work? "

- Steve Wozniak, from the Founders at Work interview

http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html

This makes sense. I've been noticing lately that if I stay up late designing, my creative flow seems to improve drastically.. Up until this point I thought I had just been fooling myself into thinking I was better when I stayed up late, but perhaps there is actually something to it.

I've found this to be true as well. My writing ability and creativity seem to improve when I stay up late. I'd like to see a real study into this. But anecdotal evidence seems to support this idea.

"Lack-of-sleep also sometimes offers a slight euphoria or creativity/disinhibition in thinking" I agree. I've found out that if I stay awake all night I tend to have a rush of completely new ideas about the problem I'm working on.

Sleep deprivation even works as a temporary "cure" for clinical depression, but for most patients the effect only lasts one day/night.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_deprivation#Treatment_for... or lots of other online references.

Lack of sleep can put me in a state where I care less about my ego and thus doing certain things I may typically hesitate to do. Extreme anger also has a similar effect on me.

I've heard being drunk being described in a similar fashion but can't compare having never touched alcohol.

Same here. I can brainstorm considerably better when I stay up late. Can't implement well at all, but I have an intuitive/creative peak around then.

I find that my procrastination disappears from lack-of-sleep as well. My most productive days at work are the ones where I get less than 4 hours of sleep.

I find that I am much better at thinking of tasks or new ideas/projects but am much worse at finishing them while staying up late.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com