| "Problems just become simpler"... here is my story about that! I've smoked ever since I was 14. Most of the time about once a week, at times not smoking for a year, and sometimes all day for months. Smoking very frequently has a negative effect on me when it comes to business. I have more trouble finding motivation and caring, I am less in control of myself and get along less easily with people.. I become a feral hacker pretty fast. On the other hand, I find a lot of benefits in smoking occasionally. It seems pot disconnects you from your "hard-drive". You have problems pulling data that is otherwise readily available, and much that happens when you smoke doesn't seem to get stored at all. So what's the advantage? Well, it doesn't seem to affect what's in your "RAM". You're like a super AI with a completely fresh storage and barely any data. Now data in most cases is useful, specially when you're trying to reproduce things that worked previously. When you hit a wall though, it can become a burden. Most of you probably remember the sentence "You must unlearn what you have learned"! Except in this case, you lose factual data, but not cognitive processes. You certainly won't suddenly be able to levitate, but it's amazing what the brain can come up with when you lose track of all the common practices. I've done a year of math prep in one of EU's hardest universities, and it was amazingly hard. Trying to solve any of the problems while high would lead to a ton of execution mistakes (copying stuff wrong, losing track of what you were doing etc), and was generally bad. Being slightly high for a test would cut my grade in half. On the other hand, on many occasions, I spent a couple hours attempting to solve something from any possible angle and failed, like solving a rubik's cube and always coming back to the same configuration. Then at some point, later in the day or week, I'd think about that problem again while being high, and have my mind elegantly walk through the complexity of it and see the solution. I spoke about it with people at that school who smoked, and most of those who were naturals at math seemed to have had the same experience. Ever since, I've had it happen to me on many occasions about different implementation/design challenges. I've worked with other people who were occasional smokers, and sometimes when failing to solve problems (more policical / vision related than technical), mention them again when we were high, and have extremely interesting things come up. Obviously you want to review / implement / apply those new ideas when you're sober, because you need to run them through your experience and memory extensively, but weed can be a great source when you need an alternate angle of approach. |