University of Cambridge Cognitive Ability Test

Man my cognitive abilities have tanked since I was in my 20s. I remember doing IQ tests and scoring 130+

I’m now 43 and other day I was looking up test papers for the 11+ (school entrance exams for 11 year olds) and thinking - damn this is HARD!

Anyone else feel like they used to be so much quicker?

Do you think it’s really the fact that you were younger or just that you have a lot more responsibilities now?

I’m in my early 30s and I definitely feel less sharp than in my 20s, but I also feel like my priorities have changed and I have more responsibilities at work and at home, so I have much less ability to just be able to do very long periods of focused studying/thinking like I used to in my 20s

I asked my parents about this as they are both accomplished people and work in STEM/academia.

They both mentioned feeling less sharp when they hit their mid-to-late 30s, which corresponds to… when they had kids. I know correlation isn’t causation, but seeing all of my coworkers who have young children now all mention they’ve had a marked decrease in mental acuity for work due to sleep deprivation (and having to prioritize their kids), I’m going to guess this is it.

I also wonder if you just had a month to focus on refreshing what you learned in school how quickly it would all come back.

It cannot be understated how much kids interrupt the ability to focus on tasks. The ability to do nothing but focus on solving on a problem for a week straight felt like 100x the productivity of having to totally context switch at the end of the day to someone needing a juice or going into a screaming tantrum because the color of the cup is wrong and that being non-stop until the next work-day, which totally obliterates all the short-term working memory you had of the task at hand.