It is Friday, at 3:00pm and you really need to analyze something and solve a particular problem, but it is hard. No matter how hard you try to focus, you find it difficult to get your brain to stay engaged long enough to complete a coherent train of thought. Your mind is very willing to jump onto any distracting thought, and soon enough, you find yourself doing something else, something unrelated to your analytical thinking. You are not quite sure why this is the case, but the ability to sit and concentrate evades you. Pretty soon, you start telling yourself that you will get to it over the weekend, which, of course, you will not. What is going on here?
There are many causal factors, but one that we do not think about is the fact that the brain is a living, working organ, and it burns calories just like the rest of the body. The amount of calories that our brain consumes is surprising. Our brains are very large in comparison to the other creatures that live on this planet with us. Many of the organs in the human body consume significant calories, such as the liver. The brain is one of the largest. Although it only makes up about 2% of our body weight, the brain consumes about 20% of our daily energy and oxygen intake. This is why you pass out when you do not get enough oxygen and you get dizzy when you do not have enough calories. The brain is quite literally a thinking machine.
Another consideration is that the brain is always burning calories. It never shuts off, it requires a constant and steady blood flow to supply necessary energy and oxygen. While the burn rate remains steady, there are forms of thinking that cause a spike in demand. The first and foremost is analytical thinking. The kind that chess players engage in. This type of thinking requires intense focus, problem-solving, and logical reasoning. This form of thought uses the largest areas of the brain, and therefore, with this level of thinking, you can increase your metabolic rate and burn more calories than other types of thinking. I honestly do not know just how much or how accurate this claim is, but I have heard and seen many empirical examples that demonstrate there is truth to this.
There is a famous rumor in the Chess world that Anatoly Karpov lost 22 pounds during his 5-month and 48-game match against Garry Kasparov. This match was aborted due to concerns about player health. Some chess people like to think he lost all of this weight because of his intense thinking. This may or may not be true. It could also be because he was stressed, not eating and playing chess all the time instead of eating good meals. However, this is not the only anecdotal evidence of this. Many chess players can point to losing weight during intense chess matches. This is hard for people to imagine. They think of a chess match as James Bond sitting casually in a dining room, sipping Martini’s. In reality, the standard high-level match is at least 5 – 6 days with two games each day, most lasting at least 4 hours each. They are literally sitting at a table and staring at a chessboard and thinking – a lot.
I can attest to this myself. I competed in a chess tournament for a weekend, and when my family would go out to dinner after rounds, I would be like a zombie. Brain dead and staring into space. Ravenously hungry and dead tired when I hit the pillow. I believe that it is clear that deep forms of thinking, such as analytical reasoning, creative thinking, and perhaps social or emotional thinking, burn more calories than just sitting and staring off into space.
The bottom line is that thinking, especially deep thinking, requires more energy and requires you to have a good source of calories, be well-oxygenated, and be hydrated so that the blood flows in and out of your brain with ease. I also think that you should not just eat temporary, easy-to-burn foods high in sugar. Those will wear off quickly and not be available in the bloodstream, and your thinking will slow down while the body works on converting and gaining ATP through other means.
I am not a scientist, or even that knowledgeable about nutrition and physical fitness. However, I do not think it is a stretch in reasoning to believe that the human brain, a large and important organ in our body needs the proper flow of nutrition, water and oxygen for you to engage in that analytical thinking you want to do in the late afternoon on a Friday.
Guess I better get back to it. I distracted myself long enough.
Wait a minute, does writing require deep cognitive thought? Oh, geez. My brain hurts.
