What effect does NSI have? And would you recommend I take both NSI and Coluracetam together in the morning for my issues? Thanks
I’m not really the person to ask, because procrastination is my last remaining psychological issue. I have trouble lighting the fire under my ass sometimes too. I was going to spend my day off yesterday studying for vSphere certification. Never happened. Did some laundry, shaved my head, and ate ice cream instead. I was sort of going to ask you the same question. I was wondering if you had looked into the neurobiological basis of motivation and could offer any insights as to how I might tweak my stack. The weird thing is that once I start doing a task, I can’t stop. I’ll put off cleaning up the yard until the weeds are growing through the windows, but once I get out there and start hacking, I won’t stop until the Sun goes down, and sometimes not even then. If I had cracked the books yesterday, I would have chewed through six chapters and absorbed all of it without batting an eyelash.
As for specific compounds, that’s hard to say. As I told one of my co-workers the other day, “this is uncharted territory.” “If you want to experiment with this stuff, you just have to grow a pair because there are no clear guidelines.” What NSI-189 does for me is completely abolish all of my sense of self-doubt, which has been an issue for me ever since I was in grade school. Making an educated guess, motivation is probably strongly tied to expectation of reward, and is most likely involves dopaminergic pathways. Other than that, I gots nuthin’.
Motivation is a fundamental challenge to everyone, because there is a multi-tiered psychological element there. I have been thinking lately...
Let me try to explain my theory:
Trying to motivate yourself to do something that has no immediate pleasurable reward or immediate, or fear of eventual consequences - e.g. an unhappy boss, is incoherent
in terms of cognition.
The brain general has difficulty with things that have nothing to do with the problems it has evolved to solve. Simply put the brain has incredible difficulty with concepts like time dilation, time compounding, certain types of quantum mathematics and so on, its basically half blind to it. And attempts to force these ideas onto the brain drains a lot of computational energy, it generates fatigue , this is why I suspect people burn out on things they use willpower to do.
So when you motivate yourself by thinking of a future result or achievement, your brain actually just simply fail to understand this concept of you doing something now that will have benefits for you in the future, it simply doesn't make sense as your brain is programmed to prioritise immediate rewards and immediate threats. The brain only lives in present time, it really struggles for example to picture how money will compound in 20 years.
What essentially happens I think is you think "you understand it", but thats only the higher functioning brain understanding the concept of future consequences and reward, your brain a multilayered cognitive machine as a whole functions primarily in the present. So it make sense for your brain to basically go for pleasurable things because it only lives in the present really.
Consequently thats why people fail to work when there are no consequences presented, and people often turn themselves around when they are hours from a deadline or rock bottom in finances. Most people have to derive motivation from their circumstances. Otherwise you would have ALOT of people going back to university to study something else, people don't because self motivation is really really hard.
Most people live in perpetual manic energy in their freetime, which is this twitter like sort of energy where you do something that requires small effort, but has a huge pleasure hit, e.g. reading facebook. If you want to feel truly free you have to understand how to not fall into the manic energy daze.
So basically being lazy (or tendency to exhibit manic energy) is default for humans, and being able to work for no reason is actually really unnatural because it makes no sense. This is my personal experience anyways, I can probably work on stuff for no reason more than most people, when I go around most people are either busy talking, eating, playing their phones.
So the solution to this is just to become more self aware and realise why what you are doing now is bad for you and realise what else you could be doing, and how that will benefit you now, this mental communication makes alot more sense to the brain. Another trick is to basically just shrink the big task into the smallest task possible so it takes the least amount of pain for the brain. The irony as you said is once you focus on something the brain tends to just want to keep doing that, as it takes cognitive resources to switch between tasks.
Manic energy is like a spiral, you post one facebook comment, and your brain feeds off the reply before you know it you have a candy bar in your hand, and then you want to talk to your mates about going out. To avoid manic energy you have to understand that its just sort of like the need to eat chips when you see them. Its fleeting, if you just wait it out you will be over it. So what I do when I feel the itch to something with manic energy (basically low effort and high instant dopamine fix), I just shut myself off, and count to 60 and do nothing and just wait for the urge to go away. Not sure if it works for others but it really helps me not fall into the spiral trap.
On a chemical note this is why amphetamines work, because they force unnatural release of dopamine in your frontal brain, this increase in executive function allows the brain to have more direct control over itself, our ability to override is our willpower. However this is unsustainable because homeostasis and high levels of dopamine will eventually baseline the effects. If this was not the case then coffee drinkers will have a 10%+ advantage compared to normal people, but obviously this is not the case. Increasing intelligence (neuronal connectivity and so on), is not the same as motivation in my opinion. There are lots of geniuses which can't get out of bed to do things.
Training increased blood flow to the frontal lobe via HEG training is one potential way to get more willpower.
Edited by Major Legend, 30 June 2015 - 10:17 PM.
