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 that the longer you delay the decision, the worse the outcome will be on average. Depending on how quickly the value of the decision is decaying, it might not make sense to spend hours trying to access your mental state. I don’t know exactly how to solve a problem like this.
But I think that simplifying mental performance to a simple linear value doesn’t do justice to the complexity of the brain. I find that while my brain has good times and bad times, it’s generally more complicated than that. There are times when I can program or understand math well and there are times when my brain is better suited to writing or reading.
So you should try to access your mental performance in the domain of the tasks that you are trying to achieve. If you want to know how well you can do in trigonometry, try to remember the law of cosines. If you’re trying to study constitutional law, try to recall all the amendments to the constitution. By focusing mental performance into a specific type of mental performance, you get much more accurate assessments.
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 that the longer you delay the decision, the worse the outcome will be on average. Depending on how quickly the value of the decision is decaying, it might not make sense to spend hours trying to access your mental state. I don’t know exactly how to solve a problem like this.
But I think that simplifying mental performance to a simple linear value doesn’t do justice to the complexity of the brain. I find that while my brain has good times and bad times, it’s generally more complicated than that. There are times when I can program or understand math well and there are times when my brain is better suited to writing or reading.
So you should try to access your mental performance in the domain of the tasks that you are trying to achieve. If you want to know how well you can do in trigonometry, try to remember the law of cosines. If you’re trying to study constitutional law, try to recall all the amendments to the constitution. By focusing mental performance into a specific type of mental performance, you get much more accurate assessments.