I end up mentally exhausted and resistant to demands.
I relate to this, but it makes me wonder if progressive overload / antifragile dynamics apply here. In resistance training you (1) expose your musculoskeletal system to stress, (2) consume nutrition for recovery, (3) rest to allow recovery beyond the initial setpoint, and (4) repeat step 1 with progressively increasing stress. So I wonder if mental stress works the same way.
I’ve tried looking into kinds of brain training such as dual-n-back and it seems like research is generally pessimistic about skill transfer. It seems if you practice one cognitively demanding task it makes you better at that task, but that doesn’t transfer to dissimilar tasks.
But I wonder if those trials have been misunderstanding mental effort. At first starting dual-n-back it feels effortful, but once you have practice, it no longer feels effortful, even as n increases, so what would be required for progressive overload would be a better model of mental effort. It seems like silentbob’s procrastination drill would come closer than any fixed cognitive test practice, but in general I would think it is the switching to cognitively dissimilar tasks that causes the cognitive stress. Feeling like you’ve been thrown in the deep end without knowing how to swim, so to speak. Once you figure out how to swim you can’t use swimming to practice figuring out how to swim anymore, then you’re just practicing swimming.
I relate to this, but it makes me wonder if progressive overload / antifragile dynamics apply here. In resistance training you (1) expose your musculoskeletal system to stress, (2) consume nutrition for recovery, (3) rest to allow recovery beyond the initial setpoint, and (4) repeat step 1 with progressively increasing stress. So I wonder if mental stress works the same way.
I’ve tried looking into kinds of brain training such as dual-n-back and it seems like research is generally pessimistic about skill transfer. It seems if you practice one cognitively demanding task it makes you better at that task, but that doesn’t transfer to dissimilar tasks.
But I wonder if those trials have been misunderstanding mental effort. At first starting dual-n-back it feels effortful, but once you have practice, it no longer feels effortful, even as n increases, so what would be required for progressive overload would be a better model of mental effort. It seems like silentbob’s procrastination drill would come closer than any fixed cognitive test practice, but in general I would think it is the switching to cognitively dissimilar tasks that causes the cognitive stress. Feeling like you’ve been thrown in the deep end without knowing how to swim, so to speak. Once you figure out how to swim you can’t use swimming to practice figuring out how to swim anymore, then you’re just practicing swimming.