[quark83]

I created a throwaway account so it's not associated with my normal handle on here. This post brings up something I've been wondering about, and it's something that's really been bothering me the last few years.

I feel like I've become significantly less intelligent over time, and I can't figure out if that's really the case, or if it's a different issue that simply makes me feel less intelligent.

When I was in high school, everything I learned was simple -- everything was a piece of cake. I would program my TI calculator (with a list of assembly opcodes next to me) at the back of the class and basically ignore the lesson and then get the highest grade on every test. Same in chemistry. Every standardized test I took (SAT, ACT, etc.) gave results in the 99th percentile. Same with the AMC and AIME. I graduated 1/200 in my class. I had all kinds of interesting programming projects in my free time from age 12 to 18.

Then I went to college: a STEM school. The first semester went fine; I got all A's. The second semester, I got my first B ever. The third semester, more B's. Eventually a C. My final GPA ended up being 3.5, significantly lower than anything I had been used to. I couldn't stay awake during lessons in class. I was sleepy all the time despite getting good sleep (8-9 hours) every night. I never skipped class, but I may as well have considering how sleepy and groggy as I was. This had never been an issue in high school. I don't ever remember getting sleepy in class then, even if the lecture was boring.

Suddenly, new subjects became incomprehensible. The ease at which I previously absorbed new material was gone. Nothing "clicked" anymore. I'm in graduate school now and still nothing "clicks". I attend department seminars where visiting professors present their research, and it may as well be alien gibberish. I feel like I'm just faking my way through grad school at this point. I can still manage A's and B's in classes without ever understanding the content only because of the way the grading system's designed. Luckily, I seemed to have retained my programming capabilities.

I can't figure out what caused this. One option is physical: perhaps something chemically changed within my brain. Virus, physical trauma, getting older? No idea really. The other option is environmental. In high school I only had dial-up internet access, so anything I wanted to download, I had to really want. It was an all-day ordeal to get a 3 MB file. It was almost impossible to goof off online. Nowadays I get on the internet and just get distracted. I can't get into side-projects like I used to be able to. I still have the strong desire that I used to, but not the motivation. I don't know where it went; why would my personality just change for the worse like that? I almost wonder if skimming huge amounts of information online has somehow re-trained my brain to not absorb knowledge anymore.

Has this happened to anyone else? Have you figured out a way to reverse the process? I would love more than anything to have the incredible clarity with which I used to understand new subjects rather than this fuzzy, muddy feeling with everything I try to learn.

[Sagat]

I have a similar story to yours although I doubt I was as smart. In high school I could get the best grades in my class without much effort and got a near perfect score in the baccalaureate. Nothing to brag about though, since I then proceeded to drop out of law school in my second year. I completely lost the will to work and ended up with humiliatingly low grades before finally breaking down and starting afresh.

Like you I got into the habit of getting distracted online. Failing university was a sufficiently strong blow to my ego that I finally "woke up" and attempted to analyze what went wrong in my life: I came to the conclusion that my addiction to random bullshit on the internet had completely eaten my mind. The constant procrastination had eventually caused me to sink into depression, thus worsening the cycle even more. It got so bad I was unable to concentrate for more than 2 hours on the same subject. By contrast I used to read several books a week on various subjects.

I decided to drastically change my lifestyle. I cut away all non-essential internet use and went cold turkey. I forced myself to read again, at least 2 hours per day. I took on a strict diet and exercise regime. I took every opportunity to meet new people and see my friends I could find. I reduced my consumption of media (especially fiction). I practiced meditation. I distanced myself from the screen.

The point of this rambling post? It worked. I slowly but surely got back to my previous levels of intellectual involvement and curiosity about the world. I do go on Hacker News once in a while but it's an occasional small treat after I've worked hard. I'm not going to pretend to be a doctor and diagnose your life based on a single post, but I think you should at least try to do the same thing I did. At least consider cutting out the non-essential internet. You have nothing to lose. Keep in mind that it's a long term goal.

tl;dr It's possible to reverse the process

[quark83]

Thanks! I appreciate the detailed post you've written. The more I think about it, the more my case sounds like yours. I'm now thinking it's less "something happened to my brain" and more "my habits caused this problem". I'll attempt the same thing you've done to see how it goes.

You just quit procrastinating cold-turkey though? How did you force yourself to read? Every time I pull out a textbook at a time that isn't the night before a test or HW assignment I fall asleep reading it or end up staring at the wall instead.

Meditation is an interesting idea... I've never given that a try before.

[WA]

It's the same for me that I fall asleep if I do something I'm either unmovitated to do or that is above my level.

I think you have to admit first that you might be not as smart as you think you are. Highschool was easy. I don't want to sound arrogant, but the American high school is considered a joke in Europe. Not so much university. They are really good and can be equally tough. So maybe you simply experienced and continue to experience your current limit.

You need to sit down just as everyone else and study for real.

How to do it:

If you have trouble getting started at all, convince yourself that you'll do ony one page or so. Mostly, you can do more.

Try the pomodoro technique. Set a timer to 25 minutes and then take 5 minutes break. This has two effects: a) The chunk of work doesn't seem to be so much. b) You get a break before you are exhausted. If 25 minutes is too hard, adjust to 15.

Divide the textbook in extremely small chunks you need to understand and are able to understand. This might take a long time, but I typically fall asleep if I don't even get an idea where to start. You have to start somewhere and it should be very small.

And if nothing helps: Go back to the basics or get a different textbook that works better for you.

[daviangel]

Yup try the "tomato" it worked for me!

The method enables you to concentrate without distractions, and encourages deep thinking, which is what you need to be able to do to operate at a very high mental level.

[Sagat]

Actually, I think something did indeed happen to your brain. Neuronal plasticity means that your brain prunes synapses that are left unused and strengthens those that are frequently requested. Your brain is literally being molded by what you do everyday, which is why addictive behavior is dangerous, especially at a young age.

The cold turkey was for the internet use. The method I used was to expose myself to the computer but actively resist the impulse to read bullshit no matter what. It's mentally exhausting but after the first week you get into the habit of resisting.

I still haven't completely mastered my procrastination. Like the other posters mentioned, the key is to break the task into small chunks, thereby tricking your brain into considering it to be easier.

As for meditation the simplest thing is to spend at least 15 minutes everyday doing nothing and focusing on the present moment. I suggest reading Jon Kabat-Zinn's books: they offer advice based on science and without the eastern mumbo jumbo. Good luck!

[AYBABTME]

My prescription for that is something I half-seriously call 'Matrix-style Knowledge Injection'.

I open a PDF of the textbook I have to read and start the speech synthesizer, with earphones, and force myself to read at the same pace than the speech synthesizer. While the speech synthesizer is not very fast, it is consistent in it's speed and you can get about 70-100 pages an hour.

It works in my case because the voice in the earphones block any other sound from the outside world, and my eyes are staring at the text as the voice reads it to me. It concentrates most of my sense on a single source of data, the textbook's content. I like to see it as brute-forcing the knowledge into my brain by overloading it's input sources with said knowledge.

You quickly get exhausted doing that, but it's effective when you can't get yourself to read a piece of text.

[misterjangles]

Same thing has happened to me though I'm older and just trying to work and stay current in technology.

I deleted all of the social apps on my phone, then installed a browser extension on my desktop that limits you to X minutes per day in certain sites. I still go to hacker news briefly most days, but blocked reddit completely.

You just have to get out if the habit of hitting these distraction whenever you get bored or face a challenging assignment. Stop feeling like you are missing out on important social news and start viewing these things as time wasters. It's ok to waste a little time, but limit yourself.

Anyway, I go through phases as we'll but it does work for me to just block myself with plugins and such.

[AndyKelley]

Consider going to bed early enough that you wake up without an alarm clock. It's not going to 100% prevent you from ever falling asleep during the day, but it'll sure help.

Personally, my intellectual capabilities are at their peak in the first few hours after I wake up.

[almost]

So in high school you were smart enough that you didn't have to work hard to understand and do well. So you never learnt good study skills or self discipline which, once things got beyond your ability to just understand, became a problem. This seems to be a common problem for smart kids.

[hwh]

Yep, I'm probably in that boat, too. I like to say that I have very good "understanding" skills and pretty bad "learning" skills. In school, I hated when we had to learn and recite lyrics. But a well-understood math problem - I could run a lesson on it on my own, doing better than the teacher (who learned it, but didn't very well understood it). Self-discipline is the only thing I can do to remedy that problem - I'm very much aware of that. Not overdoing this is the second. I need time to refocus, and not everything can be forced immediately.

[super_mario]

I would say your experience is typical for 99% of the people. High school is ridiculously easy even in Europe let alone in North America. High school can be aced with common sense, some intelligence and minimal learning. And if you happen to go to school in a small local community you are doubly unlucky, because it's much easier to be a local star student there and build unrealistic perception of yourself and pick up a lot of horrible habits that will almost grantee you don't make it later in life. You should not ever gauge anything by high school success (high school failure is on the other hand a good predictor of university success).

Then you move to a hard science university and slowly start realizing that you must actually work and study 8 hours a day or more just to keep up and the subject is basically a bottomless pit, there is no end of it and you could spend thousands of lifetimes studying a single subject and still feel like you are only scratching the surface. This is also where intelligence has lesser and lesser significance (almost none). You may notice that good work habits, good organization habits (anything from note taking, listening, attention to detail, to times you study, to light in your study room), and social skills (who you associate with in school is more important then intelligence) and the ability to stay motivated and inspired by your subject etc. matter way more and are a better predictor of academic success.

I had similar feeling as you (I did pure math undergrad and pure math grad school). You are not slowing down mentally, you are just getting fatigued and saturated and getting into more and more esoteric and fringe areas of your subject study. You have to know that most of those visiting professors are lone experts in esoteric razor edge thin subject and they get incredibly excited when they hear there might be another person somewhere across the globe who might have remote interest in roughly the same thing as them. That's just to give you some perspective. I'm sure when you look back at those courses you took years ago and that you thought were incredibly difficult and challenging, you find them trivially easy and boring. That means you have grown by order of magnitude.

[wisty]

> Suddenly, new subjects became incomprehensible. The ease at which I previously absorbed new material was gone. Nothing "clicked" anymore. I'm in graduate school now and still nothing "clicks". I attend department seminars where visiting professors present their research, and it may as well be alien gibberish. I feel like I'm just faking my way through grad school at this point. I can still manage A's and B's in classes without ever understanding the content only because of the way the grading system's designed. Luckily, I seemed to have retained my programming capabilities.

Once you've gotten past basic calculus, you can't learn as much because all the resources are poor. Sure, you can read research papers (which are written for people who already understand 90% of them), or a PhD thesis (maybe a better option, as PhD students pad them with lots of exposition to make up the page count); but they suck compared to a well-designed undergrad text. Did you learn calculus by reading a single proof, or did you do a lot of example questions? How much are you practicing the basic techniques, or are you just saying "yeah, in principle that bit's already been done ... nothing to do there".

You also sound like you are losing motivation, and suffering a bit from "impostor syndrome", both of which are very common in grad school. You need to learn when to relax, when to push yourself, and when to just keep plugging. I find that forcing myself to relax when I'm getting distracted can "reset" my ability to focus. If you find yourself reading something that's just crap (this sentence?), look away from the monitor for as long as you can.

[Hydraulix989]

It sounds like you have sleep apnea disorder. I have the same disorder and am on a CPAP machine now, and I sleep much better. The symptoms are exactly as you described -- tired all of the time despite 8+ hours of sleep a night, decreased motivation, lack of concentration, inability to learn, and the apneas happen entirely while you're asleep so you do not wake up or realize anything is wrong with your sleep except that it is no longer productive. Moreover, if you have gained weight during college, this change can exacerbate your condition. I highly recommend scheduling an overnight study at a sleep lab. It could change your life. Feel free to reach out to me if you end up having the disorder -- my email is [e-mail]

[colomon]

For me, it reached the point where I several times fell asleep sitting up in my office chair -- in the middle of a conversation!

[kybernetyk]

We're you checked for thyroid dysfunction? I had similar symptoms in high school. I became tired easily, 12 hours sleep were not enough (thus I overslept regularly) and my grades became bad. I also couldn't grasp new concept as easily.

After I was diagnosed (which was a lucky coincidence) and started to take medicine it all reversed.

Ask your doctor. The test is a simple blood test.

[WA]

Look, university is a bit harder than high school. There's quite a step. Maybe your gifts don't apply that well to university and you have to figure out a way to learn that stuff – really learn it.

Feeling like you don't get stuff in grad school could be, because you lack the foundation you should've built earlier in college.

The solution might be as simple as: Get the foundation right, learn that stuff from the first years again and learn it in such a way that you have a good understanding. And then digest grad school material the same way.

[theorique]

Competing with 'average' high school students on 'average' high school material and still coming out on top is easy for many highly gifted people (indeed, that's sort of the definition).

As you get more advanced and specialized in your level of education, the material gets harder and the peer group gets more focused on a narrower area or field.

Even if grading is not done on a formal curve comparing students to each other, a test aimed at graduate students' skill level is going to assume a greater level of baseline knowledge, and more facility with techniques and tools of the field. So it will take more of even a 'gifted' person's time to perform far above average at graduate school.

The sleep disruption thing is another possible explanation. Another comment mentioned sleep apnea. You might want to get that checked out.

[dmfdmf]

You might have sleep Apnea. 8-9 hours a night seems high for a non-teenager and might be compensation for disrupted sleep which can kill your learning ability. I am not a doc, don't play one on tv, ymmv, etc. Do a Google search and then talk to your doc.

[AYBABTME]

I was having a pretty easy time in high-school, cruise-controlling with flying scores. Then in my early adulthood, I came to feel more stupid and slow. I think the early decline in my analytical abilities came from boredom. Until the end of high school, I had some blind motivation to think and care, I guess from some initial pool of 'motivation'. Then as I graduated, I was left with a very open ended world to deal with and no clear reason to take any specific path. And no true motivation to think through anything.

I went in the army for a while, infantry. It did help make me feel even more stupid. I developed a different motivation toward knowledge, preferring to sharpen action oriented decision making instead of analytical thinking. Might seem odd just said like that, but placed in an environment where all that matters is making roughly good decisions quickly, all the time, does unsharpen your ability to think at length.

At that point, a couple years in the army, I thought that intelligent past I had was gone. I'd look at books I used to understand easily and feel uninterested and unable to grasps anything in it.

It went like that until I found about programming. When I saw my first line of VBA (!!) while trying to make an Excel spreadsheet, I was baffled and utterly confused. I thought I was beyond my reach, but I still tried out of necessity. And eventually more and more complex constructions of VBA came within my reach. And then I understood that my lost ability to think analytically was not lost, it was just untrained. As I realized I loved programming things, I jumped into anything related I could read. All those cryptic things became understandable, now that I had motivation.

Fast-forward three years, I think I'm now much "smarter"/able than I ever was. I also perceive that my smartness has little to do with some magical gift that fades away out of my control. It seems to have much more to do with how motivated I can be about a topic.

All that to say, you shouldn't diagnose your apparent inability to think as a consequence of you becoming more stupid. You might just be demotivated and still very able, given a little practice and warm up time.

[andyjohnson0]

There are some good suggestions here, although HN isn't the place to go to for a medical diagnosis.

Two suggestions:

Are you eating a healthy diet? I know from experience that its easy to let this slip at your stage in life (my guess: early/mid twenties) and poor diet made me feel tired and foggy. If you think this needs attention then you might want to take a vitamin/mineral supplement as a temporary measure while you sort it out.

Also, lifestyle. You say "I get on the internet and just get distracted" and "skimming huge amounts of information online". Try taking some time away from laptops/phones/tablets. Go outside and think with a book and some paper. Get some exercise, if you're not doing that. Get quality sleep and avoid using screens just before sleep [1]. Practice avoiding distraction [2].

Good luck.

[1] http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/really-using-a-comp...

[2] In my opinion, managing distraction this is going to be the critical life skill for the next fifty years.

[Jach]

It's good to take into account the other comments, especially about changing your behavior. A lot can be done through sheer will and persistence (and training yourself to avoid distractions; yes you can do it and it will be painful so brace yourself), but not everything. I'll add a possibility that hasn't been said so explicitly: you aren't, and never have been, as smart as you think you are or were. Smarter than average? Probably. Von Neumann level smart? No way. You're a genius at best, not a supergenius. There are areas of human thought walled off from you forever unless advances in augmenting the brain arrive, it's that depressingly simple.

[saltylicorice]

Your experience mirrors mine. I chalk it up to your second option-- the power of distraction is strong. I haven't tried anything to confirm, it though.

You're not alone.

[clueless123]

Stress will do exactly that to you.

Try regular exercise , skip the junk (food, internet,drugs) and try meditation.. If your issue is stress, those will really help.

[Daniel_Newby]

What you report is unusual enough to be abnormal. Seek help. It could be many things: depression, hypothyroidism, anemia, sleep apnea, vascular disease, etc.

Consult a general doctor like an internist, then a neurologist, then a psychiatrist, in that order.