I have studied years of piano playing before I started Go, and have noticed that improving in either one of them comes with similar problems.
The main problem is that in order to rapidly improve, you need a very high degree of mental effort. It actually seems that brain is like a muscle. There is only certain amount of mental "power" reserved for each day and it's up to you to decide how to use it. E.g. if you study in a university, you have to divide your mental capacity between studying the (boring) uni subjects and studying go. The more you study other things the less fuel you have to study go.
They say that if you drive your brain to it's limit every day, the daily mental capacity goes up. However, this seems to be extremely slow process since I have years of experience in concentration-requiring pursuits and I still cannot concentrate even nearly as long time a day as I would like.
Caffeine works extremely well for me for like one week, then starts being a burden and I have to stop using it for like 2 weeks in order to regain the positive effect. Aerobic training e.g. running seems to work. During the time you run you seem to be in very high spirits "yeah, I will do this and that right after I get back home". But when you take a shower an sit down, it just crashes you. No tsumego for tonight lol.
From this preface, I get to my actual point. There is 2 distinct mental states. The first one is inspiration, the second one is flow. Flow is like inspiration^2 and has only occurred to me like a few times in my entire life. Every time I was playing the piano. It is a transient state of effortless mastery. Everything is easy. Everything works.
Then there is the state of inspiration. It's like a downgraded version of flow and also way more common. Still, even the state of inspiration seems to ignore the normal psychological and physical barriers of concentration limit in the brain. It seems that when you are in a state of inspiration, 1 hour of studying corresponds like 5 hours of uninspired studying and you also retain almost everything.
Therefore is it safe to assume that the only way to become really good at something, to surpass the limit of around ~5d in go, you need to have regular inspiration because it's the only way to retain such amount of information effectively? I would say that at around 3d, the improvement will be exponentially more difficult and at ~5d you just cannot do it without absurd amount of work or inspiration.
Even after a lot of thinking and trying different things, the actual mechanism to inspiration still evades me and the inspirational days remain seemingly random and way too rare. Therefore I ask. What do you think about inspiration? Do you regularly experience it while studying go? What kind of mental/other tricks you use to increase your attention span and remove brain fog? What inspires you? Do you have a way to artificially induce a state of inspiration?
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