After a crazy day of complicated CG work, I can fully understand how this is a thing. I shut down mentally some days after a lot of complicated work. Don’t get me started on “Context Switching” and how the really messes me up.
“If cognitive fatigue is not caused by a lack of energy, then what explains it? A team of scientists led by Antonius Wiehler of Pitié-Salpêtrière University Hospital, in Paris, looked at things from what is termed a neurometabolic point of view. They hypothesise that cognitive fatigue results from an accumulation of a certain chemical in the region of the brain underpinning control. That substance, glutamate, is an excitatory neurotransmitter that abounds in the central nervous systems of mammals and plays a role in a multitude of activities, such as learning, memory and the sleep-wake cycle.
In other words, cognitive work results in chemical changes in the brain, which present behaviourally as fatigue. This, therefore, is a signal to stop working in order to restore balance to the brain. In their new paper in Current Biology, the researchers describe an experiment they undertook to explain how all this happens.
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There may well be ways to reduce the glutamate levels, and no doubt some researchers will now be looking at potions that might hack the brain in a way to artificially speed up its recovery from fatigue. Meanwhile, the best solution is the natural one: sleep.”