[mekoka]

You think you waste brain cycles on semicolons? Do touch typists make a conscious effort to "remember" where all the keys are? When you read, do you go letter by letter to make sense of words and sentences?

Your brain is an incredibly efficient tool. You should trust it more.

[tsimionescu]

Brain cycles are still being used even if you're not conscious of them. So yes, some part of your has to spend cycles to remember to type that semicolon, and to even remember where the semicolon is on the keyboard, and in fact to remember how strong a signal has to be sent to the finger muscles to move the pinky to the right location and press the key.

In principle, this effort should even be measurable in calories (though it may be hard to distinguish from the noise of everything else you're thinking).

[mekoka]

I don't think you got my point.

Perhaps I should have originally been clearer, but I have no clue what these "brain cycles" that keep being mentioned are. If it's some kind of CPU analogy, brains and CPUs are nowhere near analogous in how they work. The brain is an extremely complex system, whose mechanisms we're far from understanding fully and whose activities are mostly unconscious and subconscious processes.

In the context of our discussion, energy expenditure is not really the relevant feature. The more useful "index" would be the "perceived (i.e. conscious) cognitive workload". One is addressed with caloric intake, the other has more explicit psychological ramifications.

It may have been presumptuous of me, but cognitive workload is what I thought GP really meant by "brain cycle" and that's what I was addressing.

The point I was trying to convey is that the brain is very good at moving chunks of work away from conscious processes to subconscious ones (i.e. away from perceived load) through various optimizations. Usually, exposing the brain to deliberate and repetitive tasks will tend to develop certain tacit skills (subconscious shortcuts).

Another subtler point, was that an easy mistake when evaluating how much cognitive work a tacit skill actually demands, is to appreciate it from the perspective of someone who lacks said skill.