Ater my initial push for the 99th percentile, I played for a couple more weeks and then abruptly stopped playing.  I figured that the mountain of MOOCs would be enough to keep my brain stimulated, plus I was growing bored of most of the games available.  But about a week ago, I fired it up again to see if there were any new games available and because I had just read a couple books about neural plasticity. (As the reviews suggest, the first one is better.)  When I played over the summer, it took me a while to work up to the level necessary to hit 99.  Jumping back into it now, I just started tearing things up immediately upon resuming.  Most of my old records were broken within just a couple days by a nontrivial amount, and they’ve been steadily improving too.  So perhaps whatever brain changes I prompted initially decided to stick around?  My health has also been improving lately, too, and that definitely helps with my ability to focus, process information, and remember things.

I’ve been playing games in each of the 5 categories, but the Memory games have been the most interesting lately.  As I mentioned previously, n-back training seems to be about the best you can do to actually increase your intelligence, and that’s obviously an appealing outcome.  (That said, I do believe that there are many other things you can do to improve your mental performance, even if you’re not actually changing your innate intelligence level.)  Plus, they’re just more interesting to me, and there’s no way to ever “beat” many of them: until the laws of physics governing light, my eyeballs, and my fingers mean that I physically can’t answer questions any faster, there’s always room for improvement.  And believe me, there’s lots of room for improvement.

Some screenshots:

My Speed score was holding me back for a while, but I finally had a couple good runs on Speed Match and Spatial Speed Match.  Penguin Pursuit seemed like the Speed game that I could really blow out of the water, so I did (Game BPI: 1680).  In general, though, the Speed offerings are disappointing.  Speed Match and Spatial Speed Match are basically the same game, and Rotation Matrix has absolutely nothing to do with speed.

My Problem Solving actually dipped into the 98th percentile for a while, mostly because on the Raindrops game, I quickly reach the point where the problems are obscuring each other.  Raindrops and Chalkboard Challenge seem to be the only games that count in this category, too.

The other three categories just slowly crept up.  I had a perfect run through Memory Matrix that did wonders for my Memory BPI.  And over the past few days, I really got into the groove on Brain Shift.  Good times.

I’m finishing a data structures and algorithms course through Coursera, offered by Stanford professor Tim Roughgarden, and it’s been great. The theory questions are of a good difficulty level, and the programming problems are thought-provoking and fun. I’m doing them in Python 2 (technically iPython, with Emacs as my editor), though I should redo them in a lower-level language to make sure I’m not cheating when implementing some of these algorithms. I’d like to post a summary of my experiences and the highlights of the course when I’ve completed it in a few weeks.  I’d also like to go through Cormen et al. and achieve total mastery, but that’s going to take some time.

I just registered for a second Coursera course: Software Engineering for Software as a Service (SaaS), offered by a couple of Cal professors. I don’t know too much about it, other than the fact that I’m going to be doing some Ruby on Rails, EC2, git, and Extreme Programming fueled assignments if I decide to stick with it. I’ve been wanting to play with Ruby for a while now, and web programming interests me, so I’ll probably give it a go.

I’m playing bass for about an hour every day and improving rapidly. I tore through the top beginner book before grabbing two sequels: Bass Fitness for technical expertise and Jazz Bass Improvisation to really learn my scales. I did my fair share of improvising when I was playing trombone, but it was always, well, improvisational. I didn’t know most of the many jazz scales, and even if I could hear the key changes and occasionally play interesting transitions and melodies, it was pretty haphazard. I’m hoping to do a better job with improv this time around. It would be fun to post some videos in the near future, but unaccompanied bass isn’t awesome until you’re really good, and I’ve got lightyears to go before I get there.

I’ve developed a nice morning routine that’s centered around meditation and Lumosity. My meditation practice is guided by this book, which is a great starting point if you’re interested in meditation but haven’t taken the plunge. I haven’t achieved any serious breakthroughs as a result of meditating, but I enjoy the quiet, and based on observations from my travels around the Web, science has many good things to say about a consistent meditation practice.

Lumosity bills itself as “the web’s #1 brain training program,” and though I haven’t tried any of their competitors, the games are fun. Here’s my brain profile after two weeks of play:

My SAT (1520: 780 Math and 740 Verbal, with an 800 on the then-separate writing section) and GRE (1500: 800 Math and 700 Verbal) scores were both in the 99th percentile, and a similar performance in Lumosity would be kinda fun. Less likely, though, as Lumosity members are almost surely brainier than your average high schooler. As far as the games go, I liked Word Bubbles Rising and Raindrops from the start, and it was awesome to watch my Penguin Pursuit improve – for a few days, I just couldn’t do it, and then *bam*, Level 20 mastery. Rotation Matrix makes me want to cry, but that’s life. (Lumosity offers a free trial, so you can check these out if you’re interested!)

20 July 2012 edit: I’m keeping a copy of my most up-to-date Lumosity profile here.  After 17 days, I abandoned their suggested daily training sessions and instead started focusing on the games that seemed likely to improve my percentiles the most.  I figure, intelligent game selection should be a part of measuring intelligence, no?

I’ve also been reading quite a bit. My knowledge of history is abysmal, so I’m working my way through this guy at the moment. (In the first chapter, an ancestor of mine got a shoutout: Thomas Hooker, founder of a little colony called Connecticut. Maybe you’ve heard of it?) Musashi is another title that I’ve been enjoying lately. I wish it was possible to search Amazon for all books with more than 100 reviews and a 5-star rating. In terms of finding great books, it wouldn’t catch all the classics, but there probably wouldn’t be many false positives in the results either.  Advanced Search doesn’t give you that option, though.

And finally, I’ve been trying to drop some bulky muscle mass in favor of a leaner, more functional physique. Weightlifting has mostly been put on hold in favor of swimming, yoga, and some MovNat-inspired circuits I’ve been doing in the yard.  Is it just me, or does the MovNat Thailand workshop sound like the coolest thing in the world?

There are some important changes happening in my life at the moment, and I thought the ol’ blog would be a decent broadcasting mechanism. What kinds of changes?

• Sabbatical! I’m taking a leave of absence from UC Berkeley’s Statistics PhD program. My second year in the program was rough, due to some health issues that seem related mostly to grad school stress. I have a standing invitation to return to the program down the road if I so desire. I’d like to thank the department for being so accomodating as I dealt with the roller coaster ride that is the medical system, and for giving me the opportunity to return. Bin, Jim, La Shana, my professors, colleagues, and friends: you guys rock.
• Moving! At the end of May, I moved from Berkeley back to Fort Lauderdale. I’ll be crashing at the Ackershack for a yet-unknown length of time, probably about a year. This makes me sad, as moving from the Bay Area to almost anywhere else in the US entails a major step down in quality of life. That said, I’m exceptionally grateful to have a place to rest and recharge. Mom and Dad: you guys rock.

The question lately has been, “If you had a year off, essentially totally unstructured time, what would you do with it?”

It’s an interesting thought experiment. “Travel” is the answer I heard most frequently from people my age (when I was in Berkeley, and there were actually people my age around), and I’d love to do some global exploring towards the end of my year. Traveling isn’t the most restful experience for me, though, and getting healthy is Priority #1 at the moment, so for the time being, I’m grounded.

A year is a pretty solid chunk of time, and the current plan is to cultivate a nice balance (something that’s been conspicuously absent from my life for a while now) of activities that I find stimulating and enjoyable. Stuff like…

• Music! I haven’t played music since high school, and I miss it. I’ve dabbled in guitar over the past few years, but I think it’s safe that I’m a bass clef, one-note-at-a-time kind of guy. Hmm… if only there were a bass clef instrument that we’ve had lying around the house for years, was less high maintenance than the trombone, and even allowed for the possibility of groupies. I know! I’ll play the bass guitar! Stay tuned. (Ha. Get it?)
• Programming! I took 1.75 programming courses this past semester at Cal and seriously enjoyed them. I’m going to keep the code ball rolling during my sabbatical.  First, I plan to take Stanford’s Algorithms: Design and Analysis, Part I via Coursera, which starts in about a week. Next will come at least a couple of courses from Udacity‘s new line up. And finally, with that stuff under my belt, I have a few projects lined up, many of them at the intersection of programming and data analysis, at least one of them with some friends from Berkeley. Much more to follow.
• Health! But I don’t just plan to recover from the problems that plagued me this year and get back to where I was.  No, my definition of health has changed quite a bit this year.  Health isn’t having a 6-pack.  Health is having the energy and strength to live the life you want to live.  And by that definition, I haven’t been in very good health for a while.  But moving forward, I’ll do a much better job getting there, and this year will be a great opportunity to discover and tune lifestyle decisions that make me feel great.
• Writing! I enjoy writing, and my sabbatical will give me a chance to practice. Though I’d like to bang out something more substantial one day, I’ll content myself for the time being with weekly updates right here. Though I’m sure that my grandmother will appreciate these, they’re more to keep me on track and discourage me from being a bum. I don’t think that’ll be a major problem, though… I’m going to enjoy a lot of what I’ll be doing this year, thus motivating me to keep doing them. Imagine that.

There are more than a few other projects on my list of things to do this year, and I’ll post about them when I get there.  In the mean time… an adventure begins.