Hacker News Reader

Comment by zw123456 | Hacker News Reader

A weird observation for myself, sometimes I wake up at around 3AM for no apparent reason and can't get back to sleep. Sometimes I reach for my laptop and figure why not play a few games of chess. Weirdly, my strength of play is 400 - 600 higher than normal. This observation is a little off topic I know, but just made me wonder if anyone else has a similar experience.

View on HN

Unrelated to chess, but I find it fascinating that you wake up at 3am regularly. This might just be biphasic sleep [1], and throughout history, it was believed people were more effective between their first and second sleep [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biphasic_and_polyphasic_slee...

[2] https://www.medievalists.net/2016/01/how-did-people-sleep-in...

I've found I've settled into some of my best creative musical flows when I've got out of bed in the morning by myself, made a cup of tea and started playing. I'm willing to take more creative risks and trust my intuition without questioning it or overthinking. It all feels so natural.

It's also really amplified if I'm up before my wife, I think because music is the first thing my brain actively focuses on. Without a conversation, my brain doesn't have anything else for me to think about yet and I've used none of it's energy.

You're also likely playing a different pool of players in the middle of the night. Elo is based on the pool you play in, it's not universal.

Perhaps unrelated, but when I'm incredibly fatigued and on the verge of sleep, my memory seems to acquire an almost savant quality. For example, I can will arbitrary images to appear in my mind's eye, or effortlessly invoke the vocal tics and subtle inflections of people I've been close to, and generate muted mental conversations in their voice — something I'm never able to do during ordinary waking hours. It's like briefly unlocking a superpower. I wonder if the brain operates in a different way in those liminal spaces between sleep and waking.

When my toddlers wake me up in the middle of the night to pee, their vocabulary, speech and general lucidity is better than any other time during the day. Very weird.

Apparently it's a common phenomenon. Hans Selye in his _From Dream to Discovery: On Being a Scientist_ recommends always keeping a pen and notepad bedside, since breakthrough thoughts often gestate in twilight of sleep.

Which are your low and high ELO baselines? 100 points usually means two times better and 600 points would be 64x times which is a huge difference, unless the ELO is very low, in an area where there a very few players therefore a very low accuracy.

I think there is some measurable improvement when not overthinking a skill when you are still a beginner. I have also had and seen improvement in foreign language speaking when people are tired or drunk.

Cognitive sharpness is often best not long after waking and as well as after light exercise. You can use these to your advantage when trying to climb rank.

Is it weird if I feel like my brain is completely useless for the first 4 hours of the day, I feel like my concentration gets better the longer the day goes - exercise definitely does it for me too.

I'd look into health or sleep habit related things potentially causing this. I don't think that is normal, unless maybe you're addicted to caffeine.

do you have any article pointing to that? i usually feel "powerful" for random activities after a 15min nap

>Cognitive sharpness is often best not long after waking and as well as after light exercise.

Can you recommend some books/papers/videos on this ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com