Practical Zinc

[Trusk'our he/him]

Zinc Feruchemy has to be one of my favorite powers. 

I also thought that it would be impossible to get a true idea for how it would feel to be one, but I think I have a slight idea for it now. 

In one of my online college classes an instructor recommended that we increase the speed on videos if we were able to keep up with what was said, which saves tons of time. 

So recently I was watching a fairly basic video and had it on at 1.75x speed and could still grasp the meaning of everything (though it wasn't particularly complicated and was fairly intuitive). I tried upping it to double speed, but that was a tad too much. Another video I could only go up to 1.5x speed, as the people were speaking slightly faster and the topic was more nuanced. 

If I understand the math right, a Sparker with my own mental ability could then reasonably store between 25% and 50% of their mental speed and still grasp a standard conversation. True, actual physical speeding up or slowing down one's perception is more of steel's thing, but I think this is as close a frame of reference as we can get in real life since you'd need a little longer to parse the meaning of words spoken while storing mental speed anyway. 

So if a Sparker decided to save a minimum of 25% mental speed when not needing it, which I now think might involve many daily tasks, you could tap much more whenever you were actually pressed. Maybe a skilled Sparker would never willingly be at their base level, always storing or tapping as circumstance warrented, relying on practice to reflexively use their brain power with maximum efficiency. They'd always be either conserving brain power or increasing it beyond their natural capacity basically whenever they felt the need. 

This is still limited, but I think it could be a legitimate strategy for a Sparker to use their Feruchemy to its fullest, being able to be quick-wited pretty much "always".

[Njvodin]

I wonder how this comes into play with ADHD and other similar conditions. 
I thought of that because when I read Wax hardcore tapping zinc during BoM, I was like "So.. it doesn't make you smarter, just think faster? What if he can't concentrate on the situation at hand lol"
More just curious, but if someone with ADHD was storing zinc (the ability to parse information (in my own words lol)), while not being able to concentrate, is the "quality" of that Investiture worse than if they were fully able to concentrate while storing? Or would there just be less Investiture stored? 
Again, more just a curiosity than anything.

For me though personally, I don't think I'd be able to handle going 25% slower than I already am 

I'd love to be able to tap zinc though! It'd make some of my uni classes way easier to understand haha

[Treamayne]

On 6/2/2025 at 9:52 PM, Njvodin said:

I wonder how this comes into play with ADHD and other similar conditions. 
I thought of that because when I read Wax hardcore tapping zinc during BoM, I was like "So.. it doesn't make you smarter, just think faster? What if he can't concentrate on the situation at hand lol"
More just curious, but if someone with ADHD was storing zinc (the ability to parse information (in my own words lol)), while not being able to concentrate, is the "quality" of that Investiture worse than if they were fully able to concentrate while storing? Or would there just be less Investiture stored? 
Again, more just a curiosity than anything.

For me though personally, I don't think I'd be able to handle going 25% slower than I already am

I'd love to be able to tap zinc though! It'd make some of my uni classes way easier to understand haha

While there are no direct WoBs on Feruchemy's interactions with non-neurotypical processing, we do have this WoB on how Zinc functions:

Spoiler

Alteroden

With [Feruchemical] zinc, you get mental speed. How is that any different from [Feruchemical] steel, except without [physical] speed?

Brandon Sanderson

I think of the mental speed actually turning you into... Let's say you sped up your body, and you wanted to figure out some really complex equations.

Alteroden

So it lets you have intuitive leaps.

Brandon Sanderson

Right. It basically turns you into Ken Jennings. That's how I imagine it.

Kurkistan

So it's not like bullet time?

Brandon Sanderson

No... It'll bullet time a little bit, it certainly will, because you're thinking faster than everyone else, but it has applications beyond bullet timing. Bullet time is really--

Kurkistan

That’s steel’s thing?

Brandon Sanderson

That’s kind of steel's thing. They kind of overlap on that one, because the steel thing... But yeah. It's more like "I think fast, but my reaction speed is not sped up".

Shadows of Self Chicago signing (Oct. 12, 2015)

It is entirely possible that Zinc may increase the ability to devote attention to the subject being considered. An in-world example of Zinc (possibly the best seen in-book so far) is - WoA Ch 58:

Spoiler

Sazed tapped zinc. 

<snip>

His thoughts sped up, and he quickly saw the trajectory of the lamp. Marsh would be able to use it as a weapon against him. So Sazed tapped steel. Allomancy and Feruchemy had one fundamental difference: Allomancy drew its powers from the metals themselves, and so the amount of power was limited; in Feruchemy, one could compound an attribute many times, drawing out months’ worth of power in a few minutes.

Steel stored physical speed. Sazed zipped across the room, air rushing in his ears as he shot past the open doorway. He snatched the lamp out of the air, then tapped iron hard—increasing his weight manyfold—and tapped pewter to give himself massive strength.

So, in a second he saw the lamp move, calculated it's trajectory - then used his other Feruchemy to counter what Marsh was doing. The Zinc part only needed seconds of thought to work through the whole problem - you would better be able to answer if condensing the mental work of hours or minutes into seconds could benefit your thought processes. 

Edited June 10, 2025 by Treamayne
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