Hacker News Reader

Comment by whacked_new | Hacker News Reader

Intriguing headline and interesting content, but where's the calculus? I mean, not in terms of rates of changes and piecemeal and aggregated effects, but it was really all quite fuzzy.

Enjoyable nonetheless. Is it possible to get some sources? In particular, 2-3 weeks for tolerance build up, and 5 days to "adenosine normality"? 5 days is a surprisingly small figure, and I would guess there is a rebound effect if it's just a short relapse. No expert here though, but coffee is my buddy so I want to care :)

Actually, would it also be possible to get a source regarding the attentional fluctuation throughout the day?

View on HN

Calculus is a pretty general term; the study of rates of change is a particular calculus. It's certainly the most common one, and so it is properly referred to as The Calculus.

All the numbers I reported are from papers on pubmed and stuff, most of which are linked to from the wikipedia article. I spent several hours reading and re-reading papers; I didn't cite them because my normal blog audience doesn't care. But yeah, you can verify everything by starting out on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine

Attention fluctuation -- look up biphasic sleep, or studies on the effectiveness of napping.

I'm looking through the sources and can't find a paper on tolerance buildup times nor rebound effects after abstinence. Alas, I only have access to abstracts right now :(

As for polyphasic sleep and napping, it is known that energy levels fluctuate cyclically throughout the day with two peaks, but I'm surprised that you plotted it with a sinusoidal curve that would suggest constant periods and surprisingly, constant amplitudes... of course, without axes the graphs don't say much of anything, but it's still a surprising presentation. You could justify it as being for a general audience, but it has significant risk of creating misconceptions, and weakens this article quite a bit.

By the way, one of the papers finds "Caffeine consumption for 4 weeks also significantly reduced hippocampal neurogenesis compared to controls." Which is not happy news for me.

Yeah, the post is pretty unscientific / unacademic as a whole, even though the results are reinforced by my own anecdotal observations.

For what it's worth, here's my own successful attempt at giving up caffeine: http://www.bricolagelabs.com/experiments/3-quitting-caffeine

It has day-by-day descriptions of symptoms etc. I was back to normal faster than expected, but I used certain strategies to help get there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com