Ask HN: How can you measure your own mental performance? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can you measure your own mental performance?

My daughter was born in March and since then, in order to get close to the same amount done while also spending time with her, I'm sleeping a good couple of hours less per night than I used to (maybe 6 hours of broken sleep instead of 8 hours of good sleep).

There are a bunch of studies that show an impact of sleep on intelligence. Now, while I generally feel like I'm coping well with the change, I occasionally do things that show I must be tired.

How would I know if it was making me more stupid? How can you assess changes in your own intelligence/smarts?

I used to feel that I really needed my sleep and I'm now trying to work out if fatherhood has taught me that I actually don't, or if I do but haven't noticed the impact on my mental abilities?

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I think there are a couple things to consider.

Our son was born while I was working at a startup. In my opinion, for the first few months, I was definitely functioning with less sleep than ever before. The regular 8 became a broken 6, just as you say, but I felt fresh in the mornings and didn't nod off during the afternoon. Basically, I felt "normal." I don't know if it's adrenaline or some other biological phenomenon, but something was super-charging my energy level.

But eventually this began to change. I noticed because of specific things that seemed out of the ordinary: More bugs were creeping into my code (I know this from objective measurements); I fell asleep and missed my train stop (first time ever); I started making comments that I later regretted (more than usual). Eventually, I started adding these things up and realized I was no longer functioning at the level I expected.

My suggestion is to watch for warning signs, such as the ones I saw. Look for patterns throughout your life. It won't affect only work, but also your relationships, family, recreation, everything.

What to do about it? That's different for everyone. You can reset your expectations. You can reduce the amount of stuff you try to do each day/week/month. You can power through it. You can make some life changes. It's going to be different for everyone. Anyone else have suggestions?

Thanks. I'll watch out for that. It sounds a lot like what I've experienced to date and the drop off you describe is post of what I'm worried about.

The first bit is weird though huh? I wonder if it has been properly studied? I know there are studies on the hormones in the mother and her ability to cope on small amounts of sleep. Is there anything similar for guys?

Indeed. I always figured I'd be leaning heavily on caffeine but it didn't really even turn out to be necessary.

The most important part of mental performance that may be impacted is awareness of things going on around you, because this can be a safety hazard, especially while driving. Unfortunately, it's also hard to detect, because when you don't notice something you don't notice that you don't notice it. However, ability to focus may be a good proxy. Can you pay attention to someone for as long as you used to be able to without having your mind wander? Note that being able to focus on a specific thing, like your work, doesn't mean that you're not impacted. According to research, the ability to focus is a depletable resource, and you could be pulling focus from one area to maintain another. See if there's anything in your life, like reading a book, doing chores, or talking with your significant other, where your focus is notably impacted in quality or duration.

Once you've made sure you're not going to nod off on the freeway, you can start focusing on whether your ability to work may be impaired. Priorities!

Couple of mundane (non-data-based) suggestions plus a weird one.

Ask your wife about your behavior. (Although this could open up a can of worms (or emotional whuppass) especially since she's probably twice as tired as you are. Just be regular in your self-awareness. Check in on yourself more frequently. Awareness can access data you could never formalize.

Memorize something that's intricate enough to not to become automatic and repeat it to see how sharp you are at the moment. Each morning I count my stomach crunches with the first 1000 digits of pi. The first couple of hundred do tend to get automatic but I can judge by my ease with the last 700 whether I'm going to have a good brain day or not. (I told you it was weird.)

Congratulations on the new baby.

I upvoted this just because of its weirdness.

Keep notebooks/journals.

Sleep isn't an exact science, so don't expect an exact answer. Some people can live on 6 hours of sleep and be fully alert. Some people need 9. Personally, I fluctuate.

I keep notebooks on subjects I'm learning and use journals to reflect on my overall progress. This self-assessment helps me to not only retain what I learn, but to give me a pulse on my progress: am I in a slow month or am I on fire?

Also, intelligence, is an ephemeral quality. It's really hard to measure due to its elusive nature and the manner in which it manifests differently in people. Perhaps return to some early work or problems you used to enjoy and see if you can still solve them or find new insights in them. That might at least give you some actualization.

Journaling and keeping records of my work habits has been one of the best ways for me to judge my own performance. The amazing thing is, you scarcely have to go back and reread them, just the process of writing down your performance for a given day helps you to mentally assess yourself.

That's an interesting one. Do you think it helps spot not only declines in processing speed or memory but also any potential loss in the "magic spark" part of intelligence where you make breakthroughs/have great ideas? I'm most worried that if I lost that I wouldn't notice...

It helps make you more consistent. The self-awareness it takes to honestly assess yourself and be interested in your own improvement helps you to address your own weaknesses. Over time you'll find that you'll have periods of high mental activity and low periods, but over time as you begin to record them and alter your strategies that they will even out into a pretty consistent cycle.

Personally, I don't think that the "magic spark" is something I can train for or seek to attain. It's a random event IMO, and will only lead to disappointment if I stake my entire life's work on waiting for it to happen. I'm not a person who enjoys uncertainties if I can avoid them.

It really depends on what you are trying to measure in what time frame. If you are concerned about your overall daily mental performance re: coding or the sort that would require focused thinking, one indicator to note could be to see how long it would take you to do things that you normally expect to get done in a reasonable manner. It's really a matter of tracking yourself against your history. If you've had a log of how much it took you to do something, you could compare your activities against that for starters.

Other thing to note would be the level of distraction you may be under. A good way to track this is to do it indirectly using something like RescueTime. If you find that the app you should be using is very low or you see a spur of new, bite sized activities popping up, then maybe your performance is taking a hit from tiredness.

But really, I would just worry about if things are getting done within the time frame you expect + compare against your control (past).

Lack of sleep and stress also increase memory problems and raise the risk to fall into depression.

Just use some simple memory tests, now I think they could be very good indicators of performance. Under extreme stress I begun forgetting things, for eg. short term memory for numbers was almost completely gone.

Some non-direct measurements are just daily behaviour; do you lose your temper easier or do you just try get isolated.

Been there, done that. I would rather pay attention on just mental health and daily physical exercise than mental performance, things will normalize within a year anyway when the kid grows up and sleeps more steadily.

There was a great comment/post on lesswrong.com a while back on this but my phone isn't up to to the site.

Do a test or a suite of tests on a daily basis that test intelligence/problem solving skills/reaction time and track your results. Offline, Sudoku, crosswords, other newspaper things but I'm guessing they're pretty noisy. IIRC the mensa.dk website has quite a good test. Dual n back seems likely to give fast and relatively clean results.

This is the post you're thinking about: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1gl/how_to_test_your_mental_performa...

Ideas:

-Log how much work you get done each day and compare to how much sleep you get each day

-Write a program to test your memory for seeing visual objects on screen

-Write a program to test your reaction time to visual stimuli on screen

-Play StarCraft 2 and compare the Actions Per Minute of your latest replays

-Do Sudoku and log the average time it takes you to complete puzzles of the same difficulty category

try http://brainworkshop.sourceforge.net/

"Brain Workshop is a free open-source version of the Dual N-Back mental exercise.

What if a simple mental exercise could improve your memory and intelligence?

A recent study published in PNAS, an important scientific journal, shows that a particular memory task called Dual N-Back may actually improve working memory (short term memory) and fluid intelligence. This finding is important because fluid intelligence was previously thought to be unchangeable. The game involves remembering a sequence of spoken letters and a sequence of positions of a square at the same time."

I do the NYT crossword every day, so I have a good idea of how long it should take. For instance, Monday should not take me longer than about 6 minutes. Thursday takes 30 minutes, Sunday takes 55 minutes. If I'm much above that, it means I'm not all there -- time to go for a brisk walk to get the old brain going.

I play a handful of 3-minute games of Quordy (Boggle, basically) on my iPhone right after waking up. If my scores trend > 60, I'm in the "rested and aware" day. If I trend < 40, it's going to be a brain-fog day. I don't often fall in the middle, so I have found it to be a rather significant indicator.

I recommend to enjoy your daughter. May be instead of focusing in your own mental performance you need to take advantage of the mental performance around you, your family, your teams, your friends.

Things change with children, but the human brain was trained for that situation for long time.

This program is aimed at emotional health, but I think you could work it into a good system to measure mental health as well: http://www.findingoptimism.com/

Via http://www.cognitivefun.net

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