Today was a totally typical day. I've realized that my actual brain function has not gone down at all even if I may feel low energy or lazy sometimes. Changes in brain concentration does not constitute changes in ability and is definitely amplified by me over-analyzing my situation, by me listening to people who think they know what is going on in my body (without ever having tried a cleanse themselves or even having researched into it), and from me worrying about my finals coming up.
The reality is, it makes sense that even though the brain takes up most of our caloric intake that it would not immediately decrease in function after some days without food. Imagine a body living off the land, not having a surplus of food from the invention of agriculture, depending only on hunting and gathering daily. Imagine, as early hominids, if a day without food went by and subsequently brain functioning decreased immediately. There is absolutely no way this reaction would be evolutionarily sustainable in our early environmental contexts; we would not have survived. Traveling peoples living off the ecology of the earth, battling the elements, protecting themselves from dangerous predators, raising children, all while intelligently gathering and hunting food could not possibly have survived if the brain could be so easily starved.
In the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, conducted in 1944-45 to understand the physiological and psychological effects of starvation as well as to determine successful ways to re-feed starved peoples from the concentration camps of WWII, patients were put on a semi-starvation period of 24 weeks. Now, I absolutely am not saying that this type of starvation is healthy to any extent of the imagination, but I do want to point out that even after such an expanse of time without food, "The participants reported a decline in concentration, comprehension and judgment capabilities, although the standardized tests administered showed no actual signs of diminished capacity." (Wikipedia; Minnesota Starvation Experiment) Thus, through these tests and through my own self-tests, I deduce that it takes a very, very long time, and logically so, for the brain to have a significant reduction of ACTUAL capabilities in reaction to starvation.
And believe me, as a female whose body expects to need fat stores for reproduction (even in times of scarcity) I have an ample amount of energy saved just for this occasion ;).
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