The thing I’ve found most interesting by far to track is reaction time.
There’s a lot of research showing that reaction time correlates with intelligence. Unfortunately, most of this is on the scale of individuals rather than individual-days; but that is of course in part because it’s hard to give someone an intelligence test and a reaction-time test every day for a while, and (relatively) easy to just give someone an intelligence test and a reaction-time test just once
I track simple reaction time (how fast I can hit a button after a visual stimulus) and also recently began tracking choice-involved reaction time (how fast I can correctly indicate one of two alternatives for a small parity problem). Research shows the choice-involved reaction times seems to correlate better with intelligence.
Altogether the tests take < 5 minutes, it could be brought down to < 2 if you were ok with smaller sample sizes / smaller stimulus windows.
(Both improve for ~2 weeks as you start, but afterwards seem to even off pretty quickly.)
I’ve gotten interesting correlational results with nootropics, meditation, etc., while tracking this. I haven’t been tracking my sleep quality, but it also frequently matches my perceived quality.
(I’ve also tried DNB. I’m less certain it’s useful. Overall, I think this is a really interesting problem; mentally, I designated it as the Taravangain Problem, after the fictional king in the Stormlight Archive, cursed with variable intelligence day-over-day, who takes a test administered by trusted stewards every morning to determine what level of authority those stewards will grant him.)
The thing I’ve found most interesting by far to track is reaction time.
There’s a lot of research showing that reaction time correlates with intelligence. Unfortunately, most of this is on the scale of individuals rather than individual-days; but that is of course in part because it’s hard to give someone an intelligence test and a reaction-time test every day for a while, and (relatively) easy to just give someone an intelligence test and a reaction-time test just once
I track simple reaction time (how fast I can hit a button after a visual stimulus) and also recently began tracking choice-involved reaction time (how fast I can correctly indicate one of two alternatives for a small parity problem). Research shows the choice-involved reaction times seems to correlate better with intelligence.
Altogether the tests take < 5 minutes, it could be brought down to < 2 if you were ok with smaller sample sizes / smaller stimulus windows.
(Both improve for ~2 weeks as you start, but afterwards seem to even off pretty quickly.)
I’ve gotten interesting correlational results with nootropics, meditation, etc., while tracking this. I haven’t been tracking my sleep quality, but it also frequently matches my perceived quality.
(I’ve also tried DNB. I’m less certain it’s useful. Overall, I think this is a really interesting problem; mentally, I designated it as the Taravangain Problem, after the fictional king in the Stormlight Archive, cursed with variable intelligence day-over-day, who takes a test administered by trusted stewards every morning to determine what level of authority those stewards will grant him.)
Brilliant! Sounds like exactly what I was looking for, thanks!