Keeping the brain sharp after degree

[Visitor Q]

So, not to bore you guys too much, but I used to be a lot sharper. The end of my degree I used to regularly post page long rants on here, well, boring you guys.

Admittedly I'm a lot more laissez faire about most things now and can't be arsed going over old ground (vegetarians, god, Africa, etc), but part of it is I don't feel as mentally agile any more. Which is a rather big understatement.

In the 2.5 years since I left uni I've kept myself busy, but in retrospect not a single thing has required any brain power (perhaps the diving physics which I had to explain to people often, which again I've fully forgotten now) but now I'm back to science (teaching it no less) and my brain is utterly rebelling.

Maybe I'll pick it back up, but I'm feeling quite retarded at the moment.

How is everyone else coping since their degree? I know the gist of things, or the ultimate answer, but I'm buggered if I remember any of the important bits on the way.

Is this ultimately the joy of life? Get fit enough to get complacent, get a beer gut... rinse and repeat until you die. Likewise, do something intelligent for a few years, get damn intelligent, switch to watching lots of downloaded tv and getting drunk for a year, struggle to win arguments with pub philosophers.

Relearn... rinse and repeat.



Sounds fun.
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From September 2014 to January/February 2015 I will not be using any English, nor reading any. As such, I won't be on here. PM at will, but I won't be checking/posting unless in emergencies. Certainly not for the first couple of months. Please berate me savagely if I break that rule...

[Asharin]

I think it's normal..lack of use leads to lack of ability

I taught myself to program in Perl and PHP about 7 or 8 years ago just for something to do, lost interest in web related stuff shortly after and stopped learning and revising.

Fast forward to now, and my brother asks me to help him out with his new website, an online 'comic'...He wants a nice interactive site and a PHP + SQL backend seemed a good idea to me...

I can hardly remember anything!! I'm sure I'll remember after I give my brain a nudge but it's so much harder than it was!
If I was getting paid for it, I'm sure the motivation would be better though!

[Visitor Q]

[Ariel Badger]

Learn a non Latin based language .
Arabic is quite easy and fun.
Russian is hard.
Finnish and Hungarian are impossible as are Mandarin and Cantonese.
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[hellkat]

[hellkat]

Good idea Ariel.
Interesting tips about the languages.

Meantime I still try to write things in shorthand, just to keep my hand in (so to speak).

(the head nun at my school always tried to convince us that shorthand was another language just like Latin or French)
(yeah right)
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Not nearly as interesting in real life.

[Visitor Q]

[Irn-Bru]

Do you read? Works for me. Usually read lots over the breaks to counter all the gaming that reduces your vocabulary to swear words.
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[Gone]

[hellkat]

[hellkat]

[stinkwheel]

The stuff I learned for my degree, as it turns out, was barely adequate. I use just about everything I covered (except some of the more in-depth biochem and pharmacology but I still retain a general understanding of it).

Whilst a lot of it becomes routine, as in you just know something without having to think about it, the knowledge is added to and challenged all the time by something left of field. I quite often have to go back to first principals and figure what the hell is going on.

I do find you get a bit jaded along the way though. It's not new learning, it's building on the foundations you already have and you get stuck in one track. Even though you're learning new stuff all the time, your brain is telling you you already know about it.

I suppose that's one of the reasons I mess on in the workshop section on this site a lot. It's a very similar set of problem solving skills to diagnosing a sick animal but a totally different system you are working with.

My maths level is totally abysmal though. Probably at standard grade level or lower. I never was much good at it and lack of trying hasn't improved matters. Must try harder.
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[Visitor Q]

[Kickstart]

Hi

Largely find something similar, but not sure what causes it.

For me it seemed to come to a head with work going badly down hill, but not sure it that is just a coincidence with age.

[instigator]

Easy to keep your brain sharp - keep studying.

[Visitor Q]

Isn't Suduko fairly mindless though? The equivalent of a jigsaw puzzle but with numbers?

I wonder if there is a page full of scientific equations somewhere on the net, where you could learn one or two, and do some practice. That's sharpened me up over a few weeks.

But like most things, a little bit of an increase just lets you know rather starkly how much you've initially decreased...
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China traffic/travel bike vid - When I make a sweeping statement, please add the word 'statistically' in to the sentence before you bitch...
From September 2014 to January/February 2015 I will not be using any English, nor reading any. As such, I won't be on here. PM at will, but I won't be checking/posting unless in emergencies. Certainly not for the first couple of months. Please berate me savagely if I break that rule...

[Kickstart]

[bazza]

[L4Isoside]

2 Years after school and I've forgotten a lot of the stuff I have learnt, I used to be pretty good at working out Maths in my head (although was never very good at the subject) was quite good in science (got A and a B) etc but I've forgotten so much of it now and find it hard to do maths in my head.

Use it or loose it I find, I did German gcse, can barley speak a word of it now.

Although I have found my everyday knowledge etc better than at school, but I guess that comes from experience than anything else though.

[Visitor Q]

[Visitor Q]

[Kickstart]

Hi

Most things on that basis are mindless.

My point was that Sudoku are just like the kind of thing that the brain training apps are. Basic but to get some kind of thinking. And I am far from convinced that they are that useful, unless your brain is already fried.

If you want to learn things in detail then you need to keep learning which is going to mean ever more detail. And probably ever more detail in an ever smaller and more specialised area with everything else suffering.

All the best

Keith
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[bazza]

[Hetzer]

The brain prioritizes according to need, and the fancy of the moment is it's need. RAM to HD and back again, as required.
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[SoND]