Unless I'm actually nodding off, I can't tell the difference, at all. To paraphrase Paul Graham, one of the symptoms of bad judgment is believing that you have good judgment.
Some things I use to test mental ability as well as train it are: BrainWorkshop (A free dualNback program), Cognitivefun.net (A site with assorted tests and profiles including everything from reaction time, to subitizing, to visual backward digit span), Posit Science's jewel diver demo (a multi-object tracking test), and Lumosity.com (brainshift, memory matrix, speed match, top chimp. All of these tests can be found for free on the internet).
Subjectively the regular use of these tests has increased my metacognitive and self monitoring ability. Anyone have ...
My brother suggests continuous performance tasks.
This is a review of four CPT packages from 2000, and this is an review of 3 CPT packages from 1995 from a user's perspective. These are some slides from 2003 about computerized CPTs and related test instruments.
Continuous performance tasks test sustained attention and need to be "purposefully boring", typically 10-25 minutes, which can be too long for daily use.
The Psychology Experiment Building Language comes with a battery of tests "designed to closely resemble many commonly-used psychologic...
The most reliable test I found, and by accident, was fighting bots on a certain Quake 3 map
For me, it's playing a TF2 Scout on a well-populated server running a Scout-friendly map. A kill/death ratio of 3:1 or greater means that I'm sharp, 2:1 is okay, and 1:1 or lower means that I'm sluggish.
However, in my case, using a game (especially a twitch-aim FPS) as a performance test defeats the purpose of testing because it primes me away from the task I've planned for the day and considerably shortens my attention span, so I never play anything before work.
...During a sleep experiment, I used to record my mental performance by a simple arithmetic game. Start with a 3 digit number, subtract 9, then 8, then 7...so on. Time yourself in the task. If the result is ±3 seconds to my average score, means I am quite active.
(Joined just to comment!, been stalking for a while)
I find that sightreading music actually works well. If I'm wide awake/alert, I can sightread bach fugues with 4 voices, and I can mentally actively keep track of them simultaneously. On the low end of the scale, I find that I can only concentrate on one voice at a time and my sightreading performance drops significantly. I also play blitz go, but the problem is that you don't realize then your moves are bad, and it's only when you review your games the next day it's obvious that you've played bad moves.
A...
Seth Roberts used a balance test to measure cognitive functioning to help determine whether various cognition-enhancing supplements were working. He would stand on a small platform and measure the time before he fell off, repeated like 5 times. One of his readers came up with another measure--arithmetic drills. A sheet full of single-digit addition or multiplication problems. The measure, of course, is time to completion.
I have a version of Tetris I think might be useful towards this end. In my version of the game, the speed increases when you clear lines ...
I've paid close attention to my productivity and general cognitive agility for the last few years. I've found that it gets easier and easier to track, to the point that I can now identify how sharp I am on a given day without actually testing my mettle.
My sole motivation for tracking was to identify correlations between diet and cognition (which has been a pretty successful program). I imagine that once you start using predictions to inform your work schedule you have to be very careful you aren't tricking yourself to avoid work.
I have a 'calibration' set of puzzles that I do each morning. Put the ol' brain through its paces, if you will. Kakuro, Suduko, Cryptoquote, Jumble. I used to play daily Set. (www.setgame.com) It all boils down to pattern recognition, but I do feel better knowing that that bit of memory is still intact and relatively accessible. ;)
The problem is - other than observing deterioration of results, I have no idea if I'm in such a state or not. I cannot be sure if it's also true for others...
It doesn't need to get to results, the quality of the process can also be observed, so that lack of productivity is catched early:
Performing some activity that isn't in itself useful seems like a waste of ti...
I have found that my ability to solve complex problems is to some extent separate from my willpower to solve those problems.
One way I've measured my ability has been by solving Sudoku puzzles on my mobile phone. I try to solve them without "pencilmarks", so that I put down a number only when I'm sure where it belongs, in an attempt to hone my working memory and focus.
I've found that, when my brain is not working that well, I keep finding that I've just retraced the same logical steps from just a few moments ago, because I've forgotten the conclus...
Reminds me of an experiment I read about in which subjects were given a pencil and a piece of paper and asked to strike the paper with the lead as much as they possibly could in a set amount of time. I believe this gave the experimenters a baseline upon which they could judge the participants' ongoing performance. If I remember correctly, they discovered that on days when the subjects' pencil strikes fell well below their average, they were more prone to accidents, injury, other physical mishaps.
Seems to me the exercise the test subjects participated i...
There is a game on Lumosity.com called Chalkboard Challenge. It gives you two expressions and you have to quickly judge which is larger. The better you do, the more time you are given to play. There are often tricks you can use so you don't have to exactly compute the value of each expression. I find the game tests my brain more than anything else I do. My results are strongly correlated with my brain "strength" at a given moment.
You have to pay for a membership to play.
I play a quick game of minesweeper on my phone. If I get a decent hard map solved in under 1 min I'm sharp. An easy map under 15 seconds. If i lose, I try and figure out if it was random or poor judgment. It's not as good as some other tests mentioned, but it's fast and mobile.
How do you test yourself?
By paying attention, not only to what I am doing, but to how well I am doing it.
Sorry for the non-answer here, but I take a different approach: I work when I feel like it.
I'll try getting stared on the actual work, whether I want to or not (you have to overcome that initial mental inertia). Then once I'm about half an hour in to the work, if I find myself watching the clock or thinking about how I should go check my RSS feeds, I'll stop and switch to my list of more mundane tasks.
Just summarize the first half-hour of your work, and if it's crap, move on and come back to it later. If it's crap, you broke even, and if it's not you've saved yourself a half-hour wasted on Quake.
This is offtopic, but anyway, since there seem to be many here that play online go, how about creating KGS room for lesswrongers? I'd be interested in playing with you guys. (This seemed partially related as so many mentioned "go" in some way in their responses. Dunno where else to throw a suggestion like this)
edit: Started a new thread here. If you're interested in playing with lesswrongers, reply there!
The most I have ever systematically done is during a weekend-long puzzle competition, with 12 people on my team, we decided that any time someone spent 30 minutes on a problem without making progress they should move to a different puzzle, and if they kept doing that, take their sleep. Dunno how well that translates to a domain where the problems aren't of known, order-of-magnitude-equal difficulty.
I've been using http://speedtest.10-fast-fingers.com/ but with no good evidence that it actually works.
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 ne...
Hmm, I have noticed myself rationalizing "I'm going to play just one game of blitz Go" as a test of my mental performance. I'm pretty sure it's a rationalization, and therefore works the other way round.
I would tend to be suspicious of the above tests on that basis, though I can hardly assume your mind's workings are in any way similar to mine. ;)
It would seem simpler to assume that your causal model (tiredness etc. -> loss of performance) is in general correct, and to organize your work accordingly.
Some time management approaches (e.g. GTD) e...
Great question. Seth Roberts has studied this as part of self-experimentation. One of the major issues is finding tasks that don't have too large a learning effect, which somewhat confounds the data.
I've been relying on various incarnations of TextTwist, and 9x9 GO playing AIs. Nowadays I run little apps on my phone for just this purpose.
As far as I can tell, nobody's suggested taking a properly scientific approach here.
Each time you want to measure, pick a small set of different tests to do and record the results. You should get enough data to do some decent stats quite quickly. You can discard any that correlate well with shorter tests.
You should include in the tests subjective self-assessment (maybe you're better at guessing than you think) and real-world task performance (even if it's just "tried to do something and gave up", "succeeded in complex task" etc)
(PS, I'm not a psychologist! No doubt there's all kinds of subtle tricks I'm missing here, but I think the principle is sound)
I try to avoid the temptation of IQ tests on the internet since they make me feel cocky for the rest of the day. Anyway:
www.iqtest.dk
I feel much more awake after going through it. The only question I had trouble with was the last one. I'm sure I have the right answer, but it feels like there's more to the question that I'm missing. So here's what I got out of it (spoilers): every shape is a shape-shifting entity moving one square to the right each turn.
If someone could fill me in on the rest, that'd be great. This has been killing me for about an hour.
*E: Moved this to the open thread.
This reminds me of a story I was told about somebody who got so drunk that he forgot he was drunk and drove a car...
Though testing your mental capabilities is useful, there are some problems of trying to access your own mental state. First, if you believe your mental state varies throughout the day, then shouldn't your ability to access it also vary?
I'd say the tests provided by others are decent, but in many cases impractical or of limited use. Say you have to make an important boolean decision. You don't know how sharp your brain is, but you do know t...
I play a a few 3 minute blitz chess games at FICS. That way my results are quantitative, as I can see my rating going up or down. It's also possible to play a single 3 minute blitz game and estimate how well I seem to be calculating variations and seeing simple tactics. Not the most time-efficient method, I suppose.
The main indicator of my mental state is when there are many candidate moves; if I'm tired or mentally sluggish, I will spend up to 15 precious seconds finding a strong move. When I am in good shape and am in the groove, I normally find a strong continuation in about 5 seconds.
Seth Roberts worked on the same problem when trying to determine if omega 3 helped his brain performance.
http://www.blog.sethroberts.net/category/nutrition/omega-3/omega-3-directory/
http://www.iqout.com/index.php?lang=EN
This IQ-test could work. The questions are generated on-the-fly to match your level, and there is really little time to give the answer, so alertness is needed too.
I find anything that's cognitively taxing makes a good test. By reflecting on the process of engaging with the subject, noticing what sorts of difficulties I have, how much more difficult than normal it seems to be, it's pretty obvious how I am doing relative to baseline. For example, opening a math book that I'm somewhat familiar with but never made it all the way through is a good test of my cognitive abilities. It's easy to look at a theorem or proof in a subject you're somewhat familiar with and know how difficult it would ordinarily be for you to unde...
I have a game on my phone from Lumosity.com called SpeedBrain. If I'm well rested or caffeinated I seem to perform better.
It's a nice little game, but I don't subscribe to any of their claims about how awesome their games are.
I have attempted to use freerice.com for this purpose (I was interested in quantifying just exactly how stupid I was, in real time, while I adapted to polyphasic sleeping. The answer was pretty damn stupid, but I didn't really need a test to tell me that). I can't say the results track particularly well with how I'm feeling subjectively, but I can't really say which of those is in error. At any rate, this probably doesn't measure very many components of intelligence. I didn't keep up with it because it is slow and it's hard to know when to stop and record your level.
Go problems would be more of a laziness test for me. The ones that are easy enough to not require work I probably know just as well in my sleep.
I think either of three methods listed by you do not really present the exact quantification of your mental performance. Your performance on these tests will most probably depend on your interest in that particular kind of test. Therefore any results that you may get from these tests will have that subjectivity in them brought to the entire process by your level of interest for that particular kind of test.
We all have our good days and our bad days. Due to insufficient sleep, illness, stress, distractions, and many other causes we often find ourselves far below our usual levels of mental performance. When we find ourselves in such a state, it's not really worth putting effort in doing many tasks, like programming or long term planning - as quality will suffer a lot.
The problem is - other than observing deterioration of results, I have no idea if I'm in such a state or not. I cannot be sure if it's also true for others, but I had to find out a few tests of what's my mental performance at the moment. Tests that are deeply flawed, so I'd request better if there are any. I also cannot predict my mental state in advance, as my life isn't terribly regular.
The most reliable test I found, and by accident, was fighting bots on a certain Quake 3 map - me vs 10 or so highest difficulty bots. The challenge was to get 50 frags without dying. As the map was huge and full of power ups, it wasn't really that difficult as long as I could maintain full alertness for 10-15 minutes - but if I was tired or distracted, I would invariably fail. This test was unfortunately extremely slow.
Another test would be to go to goproblems, and do a few random problems at proper difficulty level. If I could think right, I would do most of them, if I was tired, I would fail almost 100%. This didn't test alertness, I guess it would be best described as short term memory test, as that's what used for game tree exploration. Unfortunately what's the proper difficulty varies a lot with how much go I played recently, so it needs to be recalibrated.
One more test would be to go to some decent online IQ test like this one. My results on such test would suffer a lot if I was sleepy or tired. The main problem is that such tests cannot repeated too often, or I'd just remember the answers.
So these are three ways to test how well my mind functions at the moment, all testing something different, and all flawed in one way or another.
How do you test yourself?