isabigfish

@AirsickAviar Gold healing can heal the damage done to your body by starvation to keep you alive, but it would be much more painful for you, and less efficient than tapping stored nutrients from a bendalloy metalmind. To use gold you are essentially letting your cells die then growing new ones, whereas bendalloy is just feeding them to keep them alive. You would also still probably need to have matching Allomancy to be able to compound to keep up with the amount of starvation generated from compounding your zinc.

Compounding bendalloy is to provide the nutrition to overcome the hunger drawback, nothing to do with the speed of thinking, that effect entirely comes from zinc. Also worth noting that the amount of hunger is most likely going to correspond to the amount of thinking, not the amount of time spent tapping zinc. So compounding and thinking 100 times faster would make you hungrier at 100 times the rate, whereas tapping zinc for only 10 times the thinking speed would likewise multiply hunger rate by 10. Essentially getting a concentrated thought burst is unlikely to circumvent any of the hunger or potential hypoglycemia risks.

Zinc Feruchemy is documented to to make the user rapidly hungry, essentially the thinking takes the same amount of chemical energy from your body as normal. So I think if you were to compound zinc you would be in real danger of malnutrition or even hypoglycemic fits/death. Although if you also found a way to simultaneously compound bendalloy you could work around this barrier and approach levels where you could fit as much thinking into a fraction of a second as you want. I imagine from the user's perspective it would be akin to freezing time while they think, not being able to move during the frozen time, but being able to spend as much 'time' from their perspective as they want to consider things before returning their thinking speed to normal, which would have their perspective of time also return to normal. But it is also entirely possible that Brandon decides it is more of a passive benefit, like when someone burns Atium they instinctively no how to use the information the allomancy provides to their brain and can act on instinct. If it follows that pattern it would be like the user just instinctively knows the answers to all sorts of problems that would usually require a great deal of thought.

The primary focus when we're looking at pushing and pulling on metals with iron and steel always seems to be on the transfer of force, but I think there is reasonable evidence to suggest that when someone pushes or pulls on a metal they also transfer friction as if their person was physically touching the metal. When a piece of metal is caught between to allomancers pushing on it at the same time, that piece of metal seems to get locked into place until the opposed pushing situation is resolved. If no friction was transferred there would be nothing to stop gravity pulling that piece of metal to the ground at a regular rate as if it had been dropped. However we see when Kelsier and Vin have a pushing match on a coin that the coin stayed suspended in the air for several seconds, long enough for them both to go from regular pushing, to flaring, to Vin being pushed a considerable distance backwards. In theory the pushing match could have been started when Vin-Coin-Kelsier were not in a perfectly straight line, and the downward force of gravity was being counteracted by the slight upward component of the two pushes with the coin being slightly above the line between Vin and Kelsier, but if that were the case then when they started flaring their metals and the force increased the vertical component would have overcome gravity and the coin would have shot upwards completely breaking the alignment. If friction is transferred it opens up some potentially very useful options for using pushes and pulls, particularly for someone with the ability to push and pull. If a mistborn were to push and pull on a coin at the same time they would be able to make it levitate in place, or if they were to do the same thing on a piece of metal touching the ground whilst they themselves were airborne they would be able to make themselves hover in place. Very interested to see if this has ever been confirmed or denied in any WOBs I have missed, or if there are potential alternative explanations to what is going on with the pushing match situation.