> creativity is notoriously difficult to study in a laboratory setting
I'm really looking forward to the day when technology can more directly measure the effects of various substances on the body, rather than the inexact observation methods used today.
Take SSRIs, for example. Here's how it works. Patient tells doctor "I feel depressed". Doctor prescribes medicine. (A few weeks or months go by.) Doctor asks, "Well, how do you feel?"
We need to be able to say: "Over the course of your treatment, you ingested X milligrams of Zoloft, with an average concentration of Y in your bloodstream. Here's the 1-month graph. Your avg levels of serotonin were Z% higher than usual during this time. Your cortisol (stress hormone) level was C% lower. You slept an average of S hours per night, with E% improvement in deep sleep efficiency." etc.
At some point, the former is going to sound quaint and old-timey.
With respect, your idealised assessment still has the problem with how that translates to depression, or (after) lack there of.
Definitely agree that our understanding is only really beginning in these kinds of areas though ultimately you are often going to be treating a disorder of subjective experience with these drugs. That makes it very hard for us not to be wishy-washy these days
I feel like the points you two are stating work best in concert. We do need to start asking more empirical questions about "what is depression in this person" and obviously can't do that without substantial amounts of data to drive our investigation, and this is where I agree with the original post that we're very lacking. To me at least, the first step in handling something subjective is trying to define it, and for that we need to better understand it.
Unfortunately our perceptions can't be boiled down to chemicals in the brain. You can be depressed and have normal chemical levels. Just because increasing some chemical will make you happier, doesn't necessarily mean that's the only way.
Until we're able to analytically evaluate perception (which we are no where close to understanding), what you're describing isn't possible
There is no reason that chemicals are the only actively defining part of our mind. It may very well be that chemicals are everything we need to messure, it may also turn out that we need to messure a lot of other things. Point is we do not know, and have a growing problem to figure it out.
Structure. An integrated circuit is just doped silicon, but understanding its chemical composition tells you practically nothing about how it actually works.
This "chemical composition" is like reading packets off a broadcast network. It's not the full state, but it's good enough to reverse-engineer what's going on at a high level.
Blood work, including blood neurotransmitters and hormones, can tell you a lot about someone's state of mind specifically because of this.
Present-day science is driven by placebo-controlled research.
Your "need to be able to say" can have no effective equivalent placebo, and any conclusion you drew from such a case study would be unpublishable and invalid.
This is not to say that I think modern science is correct in this, but it does already recognises the flaws in what you suggest - recording accurate data is not necessarily an existing major problem of science. You can easily record all that data yourself (if you have the resources/cash/time to arrange it), which will probably work out great for you, but it won't prove anything more generally.
This is how I train athletes - very scientific, algorithmic, and so forth. We measure literally everything we can with force plates, EMG sensors, high-speed biomechanical video analysis, etc. Yet this technique is still mostly looked down upon by the usual suspects. Fortunately, the top tier of the athletics world is moving in this direction.
The professional world, mostly. The people that have the most to gain are the least likely to look into stuff like this.
The Moneyball revolution in sports has taken over front offices, scouting departments, and stats geeks. But not the holiest of holies, the world of player development. Keeping a player on the court for a few extra minutes per game could result in a huge gain for the team. Keeping Lebron James or Troy Tulowitzki healthy could literally be worth $20 million or more to the team. Yet they pay nothing on that side of the game and do not look for new avenues or approaches.
It is insanity. But it is also professional sports, so, it is what it is. Eventually, there will be a revolution. I only hope it's within the next 20 years.
On the other hand, continuing scientific advancement requires an exponential amount of resources and I think we may see a high watermark where we have to come to terms with the unsustainability of objective progress in terms of perpetual growth.
We already look back at the early 20th century futurism's optimism as comical, but if we manage to hold our civilization together for another century or more I suspect we'll look back at today's faith in the practical power of data science as equally naive.
This is why I am working on a line of medication whose only effect is to make people tell doctors that they feel much better now. It's showing great promise in early trials.
To rule out root causes. If the data showed increases and serotonin, decreases in stress hormones and improved sleep quality and the patient still replies "bad" to the question "How do you feel?" Then obviously a serotonin imbalance is not the problem (which is all SSRIs are designed to do).
If the patient still feels bad and the data shows no serotonin change, then the doctor can conclude that maybe serotonin is still the problem, but Zoloft isn't the right drug to fix it (or the dosage was wrong).
In other words, more data = better ability to get a real answer.
The shock value of this article does not magically turn in into convincing science. Like everything else dietary related (within the limits of reason), you should test for yourself and see how your body reacts. Changing your habits to best suit your expectations. Just because some article says Caffeine may make you less creative doesn't mean it will. Also the net benefit of drinking Caffeine may outweigh the loss of some creativity in your personal case.
This exactly. Try for yourself. Personally I find myself more creative when I don't use caffeine - being slightly tired may even help a little. However, being slightly tired does not help with my more normal, non-creative, work.
A former coworker was just the opposite - put a few espressos in him and the creativity almost oozed out.
The idea is that some types of problems are best solved with the focus you can provide at your peak times of day. However, "insight" problems might benefit from the reduced focus you have at non-peak times.
That's hard to test because you might kill people or go to jail in the process, not because it's simply hard to test.
Also, concluding through controlled study that alcohol consumption impairs your ability to safely control an automobile is much easier than concluding that caffeine intake impairs creativity.
Creativity for one thing can be highly influenced by inspiration. Driving ability not so much.
Caffeine is an amazing substance that has helped drive society forward. For example, coffee houses in England are where the ideas of the Enlightenment were discussed and from where the London Stock Exchange was originally based (Jonathan's Coffee-House[1]).
Caffeine is a central nervous stimulant that increases alertness, reaction speed and short-term memory, not necessarily creativity. If you want increased creativity you are looking at the wrong type of chemical and may be more interested in an area like nootropics or entheogens.
I thought it was well-known that when you want to come up with zany ideas you should drink a beer, and when you want to execute on them, grab a coffee.
I'm really looking forward to the day when technology can more directly measure the effects of various substances on the body, rather than the inexact observation methods used today.
Take SSRIs, for example. Here's how it works. Patient tells doctor "I feel depressed". Doctor prescribes medicine. (A few weeks or months go by.) Doctor asks, "Well, how do you feel?"
We need to be able to say: "Over the course of your treatment, you ingested X milligrams of Zoloft, with an average concentration of Y in your bloodstream. Here's the 1-month graph. Your avg levels of serotonin were Z% higher than usual during this time. Your cortisol (stress hormone) level was C% lower. You slept an average of S hours per night, with E% improvement in deep sleep efficiency." etc.
At some point, the former is going to sound quaint and old-timey.