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by perihelions 842 days ago
- "enhances creativity and focus"

Wait, how do you make cannabis enhance task focus? I'm unfamiliar

5 comments

In my experience cannabis has bimodal impact based on your individual biology.

In my personal case it is measurably and consistently transformative for focus, opennness and creativity. To the extent that it basically feels like magic at this point and I’ve only really been working with cannabis for a couple years.

Other people it just seems to put to sleep

I’m exceptionally rigorous with my dosing and have experimented with terpenes/cannabinoid profiles to the extent where I know the relative responses I should expect are more or less deterministic.

To be clear though I am not making a comment on the study, I would generally suggest that specific task focus is impaired.

Its more of a question of, what aspect of your mindset is holding you back from performance. If you need to be exceptionally detailed oriented like a surgeon then you should definitely not be high, but if you’re framing out the logic for a protobuf interpreter, you might actually work faster

I and several other women I know use cannabis to cut the boredom of cleaning. There's definitely an optimum, where your mind wanders and the tedium doesn't accumulate. But a little beyond that optimum, you either get off task or spend an hour on a single teapot. I'm reminded of a recent study on cannabis and running that resonated with me. Running is so boring, but if I'm just a little lit, it's fun and feels great.

So in my view, cannabis can help alleviate tedium and improve task focus for the most boring and monotonous tasks. But any time I've tried to tackle a thinking problem stoned, the results are generally zero to negative.

Cannabis is phenomenal as a way to see the poetry of the moment, I too use it during cleaning occasionally.

I find it is detrimental when needing to do detail arithmetic, but in high level geometric and abstract relationships it can be a huge benefit.

It’s a subpar way to treat ADHD and similar issues with focus/attention. Subpar because other medications or non-medication treatments are usually better - but many use it as an accidental coping mechanism.
You can get way more focus by going for a walk and/or taking a cold shower.
I once got stoned and watched a washing machine wash a load from start to finish. Utterly fascinating and no way I'd have that focus unaltered. It's not clear whether it was a good use of time though.
I’ve had moments like those back when I used to smoke over a decade ago, but they’ll come to you regardless (they still come to me from time to time). The “utter fascination” is like a direct link to reality, the interconnected perception of sound and motion and abstract shapes and colors and reflections and other things is just fucking bewildering. We are just observers of something spectacular.
Personally I think the trick is to find it interesting. If I find something very interesting I can focus on it for hours on end.

Perhaps the stoning material of choice alters what you find very interesting.

Yeah, but you can translate that into constructive focus on the level of normal high-level tasks such as programming, or reading, or mathematics or music or things of that sort?
For programming specifically I think that the majority of the time, most of us are not solving novel problems.

There is probably a scale of complexity to triviality of task in which it hinders or helps respectively.

use it for years, understand its nuances, learn to recognize an appropriate amount and its effects, and channel them into all the various positive ivities. It definitely works on my machine!