It is interesting that no one from this group of empirical materialists has suggested looking at this problem from the perspective of human physiology. If I tried painting a house for hours on end I would need to rest—my hand would be sore, I’d be weak and tired, and generally would lack the energy to continue. Why would exercising your brain be significantly different? If Eli is doing truly mentally strenuous work for hours, it is not simply a problem of willpower, but mental energy. Maintaining a high level of cognitive load will physically wear you out. The US military is experimenting with fnirs-based neuroimaging devices to see if they can measure how much cognitive load they can put on workers in high-performance mental situations the same way you measure how much weight a person can lift or how much time/distance someone can run.
If the problem was that he could not get going at all, then it is more of a psychological problem such as procrastination. But it seems to be that he just wants to sustain long stretches of high-performance cognitive work, which unfortunately the brain cannot do. Switching to watching a video or browsing the web is your brain stopping the run and resorting to walking until it rests enough.
It is interesting that no one from this group of empirical materialists has suggested looking at this problem from the perspective of human physiology. If I tried painting a house for hours on end I would need to rest—my hand would be sore, I’d be weak and tired, and generally would lack the energy to continue. Why would exercising your brain be significantly different? If Eli is doing truly mentally strenuous work for hours, it is not simply a problem of willpower, but mental energy. Maintaining a high level of cognitive load will physically wear you out. The US military is experimenting with fnirs-based neuroimaging devices to see if they can measure how much cognitive load they can put on workers in high-performance mental situations the same way you measure how much weight a person can lift or how much time/distance someone can run.
If the problem was that he could not get going at all, then it is more of a psychological problem such as procrastination. But it seems to be that he just wants to sustain long stretches of high-performance cognitive work, which unfortunately the brain cannot do. Switching to watching a video or browsing the web is your brain stopping the run and resorting to walking until it rests enough.