simont | Moral support

Moral support

At one point while I was at my dad's for Christmas, I made the mistake of trying to get an intelligent response out of my sister before she'd had tea in the morning. She refused to reply to my question until she got her tea – but as soon as a steaming cup was handed to her, she replied immediately and usefully before having taken so much as a sip. I concluded that it wasn't the caffeine she was after so much as the moral support.

I giggled gently at this at the time, but the same thing just happened to me: faced with a strange problem to investigate at work, I decided I couldn't face doing it without a cup of coffee to hand – and yet I have no particular intention of drinking enough of the coffee for the caffeine to begin to take effect before I start on the job. It's just vital, for some reason, to know it's there.

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I think on me, coffee (and paracetamol) act psychosomatic before they ever have a chance to.

Another explanation is that it's like reserves. If her plane is gliding just above the treetops, and you say "can you do a barrel roll", she'll just not, but if you fill her tank up first, she can safely, even if it doesn't actually use any more fuel than she had before. That is, you don't want to get embroiled, but once you *have* tea, then you're safe, so you can start to wake up without fear of having to think without caffeine :)

I think that your sister's brain assumed she couldn't make tea *and* respond coherently so soon after waking up.

Whereas I think your brain wanted more time to think quietly about the problem in the background, but wasn't willing to admit as such.

Unfortunately, I disagree with both of those things. My sister wasn't making tea: she was waiting for Dad to make it for her, which takes no brainpower at all. And I wanted coffee before I even started looking at the problem, so when I went to the kitchen I didn't yet have any facts in my head which I could usefully think about in the background...

Oh, ok :-)

Well, this isn't very helpful in terms of whys and wherefores and tautologies, but FWIW I do the same thing - it's not a peculiarity limited to the Tatham clan :)

Of course, it occurs to me, the fact that I do it rules out the possibility that it's about the smell of the drink :-)

Ooh, that's a good point, I suppose.

I mean, I do enjoy the smell of tea, and will make myself a

choptliver-pint-mug-o'-tea for comfort/inspiration/moral support, when necessary, and will feel much better for the warmth and the smell and then end up not drinking all of it, but given that you are (obviously) completely unbothered by the smell: I posit that it's a Cultural Thing, old chap, and we're brought up with parents and family and family friends saying "ooh, let's have a cup of tea before dealing with that" or similar, so it becomes ingrained response to the point that people don't realise that they don't need the tea to make their brain work?

Thing. Sorry. Babbling. Excuse me while I rush off to a lesson...

It's because internal "To Do:" lists are not parallelisable until you have had tea/coffee as applicable.

That leads to stalling when the first item on the list is "Obtain Tea/Coffee". Your sister of course realised that tea was incoming without any effort on her part. However, "Update internal To Do: list" was second on the list, and so she couldn't break free until the tea actually arrived.

Once you've had the first tea of the day, you can parallelise as necessary, and thus circumvent similar stalls for the rest of the day.

I am laughing because that is exactly how my brain works, and it breaks down in the same way at 4pm when my research group goes to tea.

But once you have the coffee you're not going to have to stop thinking about the thing while you go off and make it, so you're saving the effort of state-saving in the future. If you're expecting to need coffee between now and the time it takes to go undrinkably cold it makes sense to make it before you start investing in understanding something.

I find in the mornings I have very few functional brain cycles. If I know I need tea then devoting any of those brain cycles to anything more complicated than acquiring tea risks forgetting that I haven't had tea yet until it's Too Late. Once you're holding the tea you're not going to forget it's there (er, usually), which releases those brain cycles for reallocation towards intelligent responding. It sounds like she had enough brainspace to come up with intelligent answers, but not enough to commit to them publicly, until she had the tea. I can relate to that.

I agree. Also, you pre-empt the possibility that the problem will become more complicated and require the extra alertness contained in the cup of tea.

Many the time's I've woken up half way through thursday and cried "I *thought* I was a bit out of it all week! I forgot to drink any coffee!" :)

I keep doing that with food, on days when I'm at home and K isn't. I go into a big slump mid-afternoon because I've forgotten to have both breakfast and lunch, and I react to this by going back to bed instead of eating. Broken.

Actually, I'm just exactly in the process of doing that now, give or take the odd spoonful of rum-soaked raisins. Perhaps I shall stop spodding and find some lunch.

*hugs* I know how that goes, I'm fortunate to me it's still just amusing rather than actually a problem.

That's amusing. But I don't think I ever feel like that about tea or coffee - I don't drink enough of them to be reliant on them. I definitely feel unable to start socialising with people at a party or pub until I've got a drink in my hand, though!

God yes.

Is it not simply a case of knowing you will want coffee/tea before the conversation/programming is complete, and not wanting to get disturbed in the middle of it? You sister, for instance, was likely to need to turn and thank your dad as the coffee arrived, neatly derailing any chain of thought. Similarly, since you wanted coffee, you didn't want to start looking at the problem until you have coffee in hand, so that you don't have to break to get it in the middle of trying to think about the problem.

Right now, I'm finishing up looking at my morning webpages before I go and get a cup of tea or coffee (I haven't decided yet) and actually start working.

This is Mind Hack #92 (http://www.mindhacks.com/book/). Activity associated with the stimulant becomes stimulating in itself.

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Moral support

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