Just as you say my experience is a delusion I can suggest that perhaps your feeling of expanded attention and horizon could be a fallacy caused by your attention in fact becoming more limited as your body diverts blood (and so oxygen) from your brain to your stomach and gut for food processing (which takes hours, so if you eat 3 meals this is basically your entire day).
Exactly. Digesting is also kind of a burden to your focus, which is why one should not work directly after eating, especially if it was a heavy meal. But digesting ends at some point, after which you do have excessive energy available. So the point is to know roughly how long each meal will burden your body, and plan accordingly when you will reach a performance-high.
I guess it's mostly my brain filtering out "irrelevant data" (the location of food becomes relevant when you're hungry!)
That made me wonder if my other senses might be sharper while hungry too. As hunters, I imagine our ability to plan might also benefit.
Has any research been done on the effects of hunger on cognitive performance?
But I get the same - go without food for a while and my sense of smell increases until I eat and become satiated.
Now whether it’s related to certain allergens that I eat or the body/senses becoming less sharp I do not know.
Probably worth investigating a bit more, I never really dug deeper into this.