= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
jimmy comments on How to test your mental performance at the moment? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (70)
Are you saying that you cant tell the difference between working normally and working a significantly below normally, or that even when you're seriously impaired you feel fine (eg after being awake for 30 hours)?
I have been trying to pay attention to my mental ability since I started taking piracetam (which does produce a noticeable improvement), and I'm usually pretty good at determining whether I'm working better or worse than average. I think I have better resolution there due to practice.
However, sometimes I make much less progress than expected (ie negative), which is evidence that there's some impairment that I'm blind to. Due to the inherent noise in how much 'progress' I make, this could be statistical flukes, though I doubt it.
I cannot, or at least until it gets to really extreme levels, and not reliably in any case.
My sleepiness is not terribly correlated with my levels sleep deprivation - this could be taken to ridiculous levels back when I tried Provigil, as I didn't feel sleepy or tired or impaired in any way, after weeks of sleeping just a couple of hours a day, even though my performance suffered massively (as verified retrospectively by svn logs and such), and got back to high levels as soon as I slept it over.
Normally it's not as extreme, but significant drop in performance happens many hours before I feel sleepy or tired, and can usually be fixed by a short 1-2h nap. It's even worse, as I don't know how sleepy I am - often I know I need some sleep, but my track record of predicting if it will be 1-2h nap or a full 8h sleep is hardly better than random. People with more regular 24h activity cycles probably don't have this problem as much.