Comment by mamon
10 years ago
I heard different story: there is no such thing as "mental fatigue". The reason why we get tired when doing office work is:
- our muscles need to support our body while sitting. - most mental work includes some dose of stress, which is a real reason of fatigue.
Buy yourself best chair you can find plus do stress-free, enjoyable work and you can go 16 hours straight, without fatigue. At least that's how I felt about all-weekend-long Quake matches back then when I was living in dormitory.
I think it depends on the task. Playing Quake doesn't require significant amounts of creativity or learning, in the same way that programming or learning a new language would. We know that the brain needs sleep in order to process new memories, so that may be one factor in mental fatigue.
This is anecdotal but I have often noticed that I become more thoroughly fatigued and thus need more sleep when working on really hard programming problems vs less mentally taxing tasks. This implies that it's more than a physical phenomenon.
Anecdotally, more difficult mental work causes me to mentally fatigue faster which feels like good evidence against the claim
Dude i get fatigued by games, u have a point, but there is just less fatigue not 0 fatigue.