I can spend up to 75% of my time spacing out on digressing trains of thought and trying to remember what the hell I’m doing.

Sounds like you could try different strains for better results. Different kinds of bud have very different effects upon a person.

Unlike alcohol, which in all forms “dumbs you down” and makes you beat your wife, there’s strains of marijuana that don’t necessarily “cripple” a person and put them into couch-lock… or have one walking in circles looking for a pen.

You might want to try some top-shelf sativas instead of indica, or some hybrids.  Every person is different and it might take some experimentation to find which strain best suits your specific physiological makeup.

For example, I have a variation of one of these “mutant” powers described in this following article:

http://www.cracked.com/article_19661_6-real-people-with-mind-blowing-mutant-superpowers.html

And certain strains of daemon-weed affect my chemistry very differently than others in certain cases.  Some strains play off of my “superpowers” (haha), but with other strains I might as well just hit up some Jack Daniels because it dumbs me down into a football-fan-stupor.

Here’s one source that reviews “effects” of strains to some degree:

http://strainreview.com/

But your mileage may vary depending on how you’re wired.

However, this was in university, so I was often playing with others in the same state: I found that the better they were when sober, the larger my increase in relative frags against them when buzzed. This could be context-sensitive learning I guess, but to me it seemed more like they were playing at their best possible game *anyway*, so got no real advantage from the alcohol: their play-styles didn’t change, while mine became more fluid and “snappy”: closer to theirs.

Sadly, by trade I’m a programmer, not a gamer, and alcohol doesn’t help any with coding.

Depending on what I’m doing, I can spend up to 75% of my time spacing out on digressing trains of thought and trying to remember what the hell I’m doing.

Seems to me the difference between beer and herb is that while they may work, they wear off  (or not) and are not a natural state. The ideal would always be to get to that state without outside helpers or crutches. Meditation.

Seems to me the difference between beer and herb is that while they may work, they wear off  (or not) and are not a natural state. The ideal would always be to get to that state without outside helpers or crutches. Meditation.

Same goes for some of my tasks at work that don’t rely on troubleshooting skills.

I can only testify that 1 beer (or equivalent) indeed helps me to animate or draw looslier and mostly better. Since I lived strictly straight edge for my first 30 yrs of life, it’s not the alcoholic context while learning. Also I experience flow quite regularly in nearly everything I do.

The flipside is that no (or minimal) thinking occurs during this time.  The brain can do no calculations and discover no large-step better ways to accomplish the task (which is where the consciuos brain excels).  It will just blindly do something over and over, making small imperceptible tweaks.

Think of the evolution of nature (slow steady process of small changes per adaptation) vs human evolution (large leaps per thought, but with little mastery and incomplete understanding at each step).

This is why the industrial revolution sent the human race so far forward, but did such damage to the earth.  We were unable to foresee the long term consequences of our actions because we had no experience with it.  Now that we have seen the results we are attempting to adapt our methods.

Back in the days of real photography, I’d lock into shooting, developing and printing using the Zone System to the point where everything was intuitive and I could do no wrong. Every sheet of film was exactly what I’d wanted and the prints just flew out. Getting drunk or stoned was actually a barrier to that flow.

Put one in the other; what could be so simple?

A study just published online in Psychiatry Research suggests that this effect may be due to the drug causing ‘fast and loose’ patterns of spreading activity in memory, something known as ‘hyper-priming’.
Priming is a well studied effect in psychology where encountering one concept makes related concepts more easily accessible. For example, classic experiments show that if you see the word ‘bird’ you will react more quickly to words like ‘wing’ and ‘fly’ than words like ‘apple’ and ‘can’ because the former words are more closely related in meaning than the latter.
[...]
Volunteers who were under the influence of cannabis showed a definite ‘hyper-priming’ tendency where distant concepts were reacted to more quickly. Interestingly, they also showed some of this tendency when straight and sober.

http://mindhacks.com/2010/03/09/how-cannabis-makes-thoughts-tumble/

The only exception was during very long sets at swim practice. It was an otherworldly experience in itself, often very early in the morning before school, seemingly endless laps in that cool blue world flowing along the black line on the bottom of the pool… I’d slip into an almost hypnogogic state and it was only then that I’d find my mind drifting into talking to myself in german, almost disassociated as if I was overhearing it, but with a clarity I was unable to approach above the surface.