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?

Even at 5d, there are, in principle, still things that are rather easy to learn if only one had access to the needed knowledge at all. For the remainder, effort, time and inspiration help indeed.



It comes as a result of hard and very much work. When others think "Brilliant!", then usually it was not a brilliant inspiration achieved without effort.



Not in a REGULAR manner:) It occurs the most frequently after the most intense study or research.



Persistent study or research.



Non-stop study or research over months or years.

I do experience it, I usually find that it's a consequence of trying to use your stones to their utmost potential. Unfortunately, consistent play saps my inspiration, leading me to occasionally (read: often) eschew the "good" for the "new".

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

I also find that if I play too much, I tend to make less inspired moves

I think there is a difference between inspiration while playing and inspiration while studying. In a game there might be very inspirational moves or moments, but while studying if you get into a certain kind of mind-set, you will be able to do hours of tsumego or research with a very high efficiency. I also noticed that if you are in this kind of 'inspired' stated, you seem to retain all the things you are studying much better than when you are studying boredly.

The thing for me is that there seems to be some very good and productive days and some very bad ones. During a bad day even if you spend a lot of time studying, it does you no good. The question is: have you found a way to make these kind of bad days productive, or you just decide to try again tomorrow? I usually go for the latter.

Take a power nap:)