
Ask HN: Do you test your cognition? - Gatsky
It occurred to me that I may not be able to detect declining cognition over time due to age, or an incipient illness, or other general health factors. Does anyone periodically test their cognition using some standardised method, assessing working memory, verbal fluidity etc?<p>(I&#x27;m not talking about IQ obviously.)
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agucova
I've always wanted to.

I keep track of changes in my personality (Big 5) and political orientation
(Political Compass and 8Values) every couple months, but I haven't been able
to find any good (and free) neurocognitive assessment I can use to track
cognitive performance.

As I understand, the problem of typical "intelligence" tests is that if
they're done too frequently, it's easy to just get better at doing those
particular tasks and getting higher scores, making them unsuitable for
tracking your cognition in the long term.

I would love to see a FOSS webpage or tool that facilitated it, I believe
there are lots of papers describing the exercises themselves, the problem is
merely implementation.

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psv1
> some standardised method, assessing working memory, verbal fluidity

> (I'm not talking about IQ obviously.)

Why not IQ? It's the most well-researched, standardised and validated test for
cognition that we have. It's trendy to criticise IQ and IQ tests but any
alternative will be supported by even less evidence, far less in fact.

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muzani
I don't regularly test for the sake of testing. I regularly train for the sake
of improving.

It seems to be an odd question, like asking a professional athlete if she
regularly tests her speed and stamina. Most of the people in this forum are
professionals who make money off their cognitive ability, and likely regularly
improve theirs.

I don't have a perfect methodology for this. But every year, I solve harder
problems and puzzles, read books I couldn't digest before, type and do
mnemonics a little faster, find out which lanes on the road are faster, smile
at more strangers.

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ta09876
I've had what I think was called "neurocognitive evaluation" which involved
testing working memory, reaction time, some other memory tests (reproduce
image, list as many words of certain type that I can), and probably some other
stuff. So there's probably a standard list out there that doctors might now.

