Alcohol reduces functions, caffeine clearly enhances functions. If caffeine was involved in nearly all violent crime like alcohol is, we would think differently of it.
In occasional users this might be true, but is it true in regular users? Anecdotally, I hear far more people complaining about being completely unable to function (and I've often recognized that they're perceptibly out of it) until they've had their next cup of coffee than I have heard people talk about getting great productivity gains from it.
I don't use caffeine regularly in part to keep it available for when I really need it, and I have never once felt like I was lower functioning than my coworkers as a result—on the contrary, my energy levels seem to be far more stable throughout the workday.
Unable to function == 0 productivity. How is getting over that not effecting productivity gains?
If it's withdrawals then caffeine is creating the problem that it later solves, which means that consuming it regularly is not a net productivity gain over not using or using rarely.
I’m not a heavy coffee drinker, but I do have a cup in the mornings some time between 6:30-8:00. This makes it easy to stop as needed; there are some days where I skip it out of necessity (too busy), and occasionally I’ll go a weekend without it just to keep my tolerance in check. During these periods, I never experience adverse effects.
The main benefit I glean from coffee is not feeling awake, but notably improved ability to focus. In my experience, my baseline ability is just not as good; there’s no “bounce back” after extended periods of going without, it just stays somewhere between bad and average indefinitely.
3 years ago I took a summer and then autumn off of caffeine; my intent was to quit and only use caffeine in "times of need". This would be an on-brand thing for me to do as a person, and something I wanted pretty bad. But after 4 full months without touching any caffeine, my mood/energy levels never returned or even really rebounded any further than they did after the first month. I'm just a different person with caffeine, even after I'm addicted/habituated/develop tolerance. Notably I have a lot more energy, and I'm not a high energy person to start with. This energy allows me to better take care of myself, exercise, and be social, all things that I struggle with in its absence.
From experience, I can function fine without caffeine, even under an acute withdrawal scenario. In fact, some of my greatest achievements were done without caffeine for one reason or another. Not having caffeine just makes those things more miserable in the moment, at least for me.
I found this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2096405/ which shows a consistent improvement in tests, but the performance increase was only 4%. I'd be willing to guess that the improvement would be higher when sleepy/fatigued (up to a point!) since it would increase the alertness of the user, but I have never seen anything that suggests cocaine boosts the ability to retain information.
1) they had access to really, really pure cocaine, and
2) they used it to study for tests.
If I recall correctly, they were only using cocaine for the studying, not the test taking, and that they had good recall on tests.
For people who lack confidence or an ego, this may very well be the same thing.
Just the urge to prove myself got me far in life. Sometimes I clearly struggle more than others, especially when surrounded by extremely smart people at university, but at the end of the day I've gotten much further than those who capitulated at the very beginning, claiming they're not smart enough.
At this point I've taught things considered hard to a fair number of people, and those who give up for no objective reason at all vastly outnumber those who really (probably) can't do it. You can tell someone "it will probably take you twenty hours to understand this", and they'll still throw their hands in the air after one hour and declare they can't do it or just silently quit.
Being a quitter is as bad as being stupid. Worse, because it's also a waste.
So maybe instead of doing drugs, try to scrounge up some arrogance, confidence, pride, whatever it takes to make you hang in there.
It’s so incredibly true that even if you tell someone something’s hard and it’ll take a while to get they’re still likely to give up too early and feel inferior for not ‘getting it’. This is why almost everyone (at least in the western world) thinks they “can’t do math”.
When I left university, I started a job writing Android apps that required high-performance and low-level stuff, at the start I couldn't imagine it ever being "easy", I struggled at first to understand it all, and often wondered if I'd ever be good at it; but over time as I learned more and more of it, it got easier, then a few short years later I was a team lead, teaching others.
10+ years before this, as a child, I couldn't imagine understanding how to compile a driver for Linux and the dependencies and so on, I was tinkering with distros and reverse engineering/cracking software as a young teen, fast forward to now, I run Linux exclusively, write software targeting it exclusively and teach others as team lead (different company, different team, different role, different software, no longer client-side)
These are just two major examples that have affected my every day life, both of these things put me through immense frustration and took years to develop to "expert".
There have been others, but my take away was that I've done it before, I can always do it again, it gets a bit harder and a bit slower with age, but I've more experience underpinning anything I do try to learn (tech or otherwise) and am better at learning.
For me, it was all about proving myself, mostly to myself, and being unwilling to fail. These days, I pick and choose what it is if I don't believe I have the time or resources (or desire) to succeed, we don't have to be good at everything, just whats important; the aforementioned skills pay my bills, allow me and my family to live comfortably, etc. I could learn to play the piano (I still might), but I don't _need_ to.
High IQ correlations with life outcomes are usually pretty weak, but low IQ correlations with undesirable outcomes are very strong - I think smart people systematically underestimate how limiting it is to be not-smart.
Cocaine would be interesting too, although I've never searched for papers about it.
And what's "funny" for bankers is that the return on investment is clearly negative. It degrades your cognitive function over time, your nose if it is used by that route, your relations, etc
like every psychostimulant (caffeine as well and roughly to the same extent), short term low dose use has some positive cognitive impact, but it goes down with repeated use and/or increased doses.
in the end not really worth it if your objective is cognitive enhancement (and not talking about the societal impact in the zones of production, which at least with coffee you can control a little)
Also when you do the math on what a coke habit costs to maintain, its mind boggling. I think that in and of its self prevents a lot of would-be coke heads from establishing a habit.
For several months I took (extended release) dextroamphetamine and later lisdexamfetamine, because I was having a mental health crisis from a lifelong ignorance of ADHD(inattentive type), autism, and what was probably some sort of covid induced severe depression. This was in addition to Wellbutrin.
While I’ve not found them useful in regards to the ADHD, the amphetamines seemed to be highly effective antidepressants in my case.
The very first day I started, I felt something that wasn’t really euphoria, but more like a sense of wellbeing after months of daily spirals of passive suicidal ideation that would last for hours. But after that first day I basically felt no effects, other than not having depression. I didn’t feel good, I simply didn’t feel involuntarily bad anymore.
Other effects -I was able to find a small degree of self satisfaction after working out (with a trainer, or it would not have happened), rather than it being 100% suck during and after, with the only motivation being intellectual. It should be noted that working out had no observable benefit towards my depression. -I was somewhat more chatty if I had lapsed taking the pills and had started again. -I think it somewhat negatively affected late evening drowsiness and energy levels during the day (made me more prone to wanting naps around noon)
Eventually whatever was causing my underlying depression seemed to resolve, so I simply ceased taking the medications since there was simply no reason to continue. There is no desire to take my remaining pills, it’s just nice to have a tool known and available should I get another depression flare up. A blended mocha is far more tempting.
So I’m curious what amphetamine addiction feels like, what do they do for you that pulls at you?
It goes away quick though, and gets replaced by a cadre of horrible side effects, which makes me just want more. They also make my mind race with ideas which excites me. They are never good and never go anywhere but the racing thoughts are thrilling.
Honestly cant describe why I was so impulsive with them. Like I knew they made me feel horrible on a longer time scale but I still ate them like m&ms.
If someone gave me 2 pounds of gummi bears that were secretly caffeinated, I could see doing something similar to myself.
For example, lots of DUI type accidents are blamed on alcohol, but it might actually be sleep deprivation that is the most fundamental cause of the accident.
In a similar way, I wonder if similar sleep-related accidents or incidents could more properly have caffeine as a root cause (after it has worn off)
The question is, does caffeine "clearly enhance" cognitive functions long-term.