Mental HIIT

[guitarplayer]

I love HIIT, it takes me 15-20min/day and keeps me in great shape, ready for a wide variety of activities, for example
* running a marathon
* cycle touring with 25kg load on my bike
* chucking buckets of water for over an hour in heavy rain from the porch when we got flooded recently
* randomly carrying heavy items others cannot carry

It would be great to have a mental equivalent of HIIT, I wonder if anyone has thoughts on that.

Some sort of complex mental task that could be performed relatively quickly on a daily basis. Or you think this would not work because of a different nature of mental vs physical?

It got me refreshing what I know on working memory and cognitive psychology more broadly.

ETA: Hah, just googled and I might just carry on doing whatever I'm doing.

[daylen]

why

[canoe]

I have no evidence that these actually lead to any sort of improvements, but here are some random ideas that seem vaguely promising. The theme is trying to feel the mental "burn."

Working memory HIIT: Add numbers in your head. Start with 2-digit numbers and work your way up. No looking at the numbers on a screen or paper or anything.

Alternate working memory HIIT: Try (REALLY try) to hold as many numbers (eg from https://www.randomlists.com/random-numbers) in your head as possible while singing the alphabet/doing some other mundane task. Start with one or two and work your way up.

Focus/concentration: This isn't necessarily very high intensity, but meditation practices involving concentrating hard on all the nuances of something such as the breath, the feeling of your clothes on your skin, your heartbeat, etc.

Mental equanimity/mindfulness/resilience HIIT: Freezing cold showers and other uncomfortable experiences alla Shingon monks.

General mental HIIT: Mathematical proofs and coding puzzles if you're so inclined. Project Euler, LeetCode, or an abstract math textbook. Just make sure you're challenging yourself enough to feel the mental "burn."


In general, I sort of doubt that this stuff does much to improve existing mental capacities. I think it could help a person learn skills that enable them make better use of their existing capacity or stave off age-related decline, but I'm not sure if there's any evidence of increasing capacities. Would love to be proven wrong though. On the other hand, getting accustomed to the burn and working through it seems promising as an area for everybody to improve.

[ducknald_don]

Some of my ageing relatives do these sort of brain training exercises (although not mathematical proofs). I think the evidence for them providing any benefit is weak to nonexistent.

[Dream of Freedom]

A few thoughts:

• It is quite possible some here are already "overexercising".

• Keeping mentally active staves off dementia.

• People have been trying to increase IQ through mental exercise for years. People get better at the tasks they practice, but when they test using a different method it is as if nothing happened (There is some evidence that both dopaminergic drugs like Ritalin and good early childhood nutrition do increase it slightly)

• If it will not increase your overall intelligence you would want to be specific in your training

[Ego]

why

This is a good question. The answer may determine what type of exercises you should do. A person who wants to compete in a powerlifting competition next month does different high intensity exercises than a person who wants to be able to dance at 90. Some possible motivations....

Calm mind in stressful situations.
Longevity.
Ability to make decisions with incomplete or conflicting information.
Avoiding emotionally impulsive decisions.
Mental focus.
Honing perceptive abilities.

In general mental abilities are use-it-or-lose-it.

[jacob]

I'd suggest taking another approach ...

Intellect tends to take three forms, namely, concrete operations, formal operations, and creative operations. These build on top of each other, so formal ops are impossible w/o having internalized concrete ops, ditto creative operations.

Formals ops are to a large degree what's taught in the school system, but most adults forget what they don't use. In pop-psychology this is the difference between System 1 (conop) and System 2 (formop) thinking. (I'm suggesting there's a System 3 as well.)

So the mission, should you accept it, is not to practice Sudoku or crosswords for 10 minutes per day, but to internalize formops to such a degree that it unlocks a creative intuition; not just any intuition but one that's usually correct by virtue on being founded on logic/reality.

IOW, see this as an intellectual growth problem rather than a mental maintenance hack.

How to start with formops. See what the rational community is doing ... leave when its limits become clear.

[guitarplayer]

why

The idea sprang from a thought, that it would be cool if I could just decide to learn something and then learn it and have the skill, similar way I can decide to go climb a hill several km away because the moors are purple from the blooming heather. So the learning of the skill would not feel daunting but more like a breeze. Another more concrete source was that I am now doing a BSc in Maths and Stats and insofar as maths modules are a breeze, I took one econ module and it was/is more daunting (but useful and I am happy with what I learn). So I am asking myself 'why is that' and how can I train a general mental capacity to easily learn.

@canoe I like this expression 'mental "burn"'. I actually do some of the things you've mentioned.

[...]

• It is quite possible some here are already "overexercising".

[...]

Ha!

Yes you probably know as well as I that if someone was able to pinpoint an actionable correlate of IQ, they would be making lots of money; the Ritalin guys probably do.

When you mentioned staving off dementia, my sister-in-law came to my mind talking about how she earned herself a few years of high quality old age by moving abroad and needing to learn a new language. Perhaps a candidate for a mental HIIT would be learning a new language.

@Ego, I am thinking dancing at 90, and generally some sort of exercise or activity that is global in scope of the mental aspects it involves.

Formals ops are to a large degree what's taught in the school system, but most adults forget what they don't use. In pop-psychology this is the difference between System 1 (conop) and System 2 (formop) thinking. (I'm suggesting there's a System 3 as well.)

So the mission, should you accept it, is not to practice Sudoku or crosswords for 10 minutes per day, but to internalize formops to such a degree that it unlocks a creative intuition; not just any intuition but one that's usually correct by virtue on being founded on logic/reality.

IOW, see this as an intellectual growth problem rather than a mental maintenance hack.

How to start with formops. See what the rational community is doing ... leave when its limits become clear.

This I feel is along the lines of Stefan Banach's saying that 'good mathematicians see analogies; great mathematicians see analogies between analogies.' Without doubt one can postulate a system above formal; I did a year of acoustics at uni when I was a teenager and was mesmerised my the electro-mechano-acoustic analogy. To this day I find it mind blowing how the same/similar rules apply in such different contexts.

This is good what you write but general, but maybe it has to be general.

[daylen]

Learn to love learning, and recursion.. and immersion.... and ..

[jacob]

Yeah, it kills me how so very many stop reading/writing(*) after "getting their degree" and proceed to regress their mental acuity 1-2 levels back down as they revert to intellectual slackerhood. This is why "are you smarter than a 5th grader" is even a thing. It's where a "continuously trained child" mentally meets a "neglected adult". Most adults seem to survive based on experience and the existing power structure. Not so much on their ability to "operate". Children start becoming capable of formop at about age 7. Many adults are kinda shite at it because it's easier to follow along whatever is in front of their nose.

(*) There's of course a lot more to reading and 'riting ... but those are still a pretty big deal in the 21st century.

[AxelHeyst]

I think a few concepts from Scott Young’s Ultralearning stuff is relevant here. As has been said, doing generic “exercises” tend to just make you good at doing those exercises. In other words, doing useless things is useless. One of Young’s principles is “directness”, meaning, as much as possible, “practice” by doing the actual thing you want to get good at.

“Reviewing” is terrible because it’s training you to recognize the information when you see it. But on a test, you won’t be presented with the information and asked if it rings a bell. There will be a blank spot that you have to fill in. So, *if your goal is to do well on a test*, you should practice by taking tests or test-like exercises.

But who wants to get good at taking tests. We want to get good at doing useful or interesting things, right? So, using Scott’s principle of directness, we can think of constructing HIIT style “exercises” that are actually doing the thing we want to do. Some examples:

If you are reading a challenging non-fic book, you could 1) Do a 20 minute walking discursive meditation on a phrase, paragraph, or idea. 2) Find a willing friend and try to verbally explain a concept to them. You will quickly discover the holes in your knowledge. 3) After reading the book, write a closed-book summary of the big idea (this draws on Scott’s principle of Direct Recall). Then, maybe the next day, do an open-book written summary of it, and compare and contrast to the closed-book summary you wrote.

The next time you need to go somewhere, don’t just use the nav on your phone. Memorize the route - but, key here, don’t memorize “turn left on Main, turn right on 3rd st” - try to build a visual mental model of the route, including cardinal directions, landmarks, as well as street names and approximate distances between navigation events (turning). In other words, build a robust enough mental model of your route that even if you miss a turn or two, you’ll be able to orient yourself and get to the destination anyways. This is a great and useful mental exercise imo.

The next time you get stumped doing something Technical and physical, like fixing a toilet or rebuilding a carburetor, do a few closed-eyes visualization exercises where you attempt to build a 3d model of the object in your mind to the point that you can rotate it around, take it apart, see how the pieces fit, and also see the flows of energy, forces, and matter (okay water at 6”wc presses on rubber flange, sealing it, but the gasket underneath the tank is old so maybe rigid, and….). The idea here is to *understand* the thing, don’t just memorize the steps of how to fix it.

Our worlds are rich for opportunities to do useful and challenging things with our minds. I think instead of “going to the mental gym” with our minds, we can start finding opportunities for doing the cognitive equivalent of running to the grocery store with a backpack and rucking back home instead of driving. “work out” in your daily environment doing useful things, at a higher level, without the training wheels that most people use.

[7Wannabe5]

Coffee.

[ducknald_don]

I suspect diet and exercise is going to trump everything else.