I started playing with lumosity today and was instantly hooked– it’s a website that has a series of cognitive exercises testing visual attention, working memory, and processing speed.  Processing speed was my favorite– it’s a series of simple arithmetic problems that you have to solve as fast as possible.  I can usually just glance at the equation and know the answer, and it’s strange when I see one like ‘22 - 8′ that misses my math cache and I have to actually think for a second to come up with the answer.

I’ve been rekindling my fascination with how people process information lately– really, ever since the Heather Gold Show at SXSW.  I’m a pattern matcher, I can solve problems when I manage to see the underlying structure.  The implication of this is that I’ll either figure something out incredibly fast or painfully slow– painful for me, since I usually solve things quickly and I can’t quite ever figure out why I see some things so quickly and not other things.   It’s also what makes me such a bad math teacher– I can see the answer like I’m looking at a picture, and don’t understand why other people don’t.

(The other obvious question is what could I accomplish if I spent less time measuring my cognitive ability and more time using it to do something.)

Labels: cognition

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