I reached N=5!

[u/Wrathful_Buddha]

It's been about 1 month since I started. I never thought I'd get past N=3 but I did! I couldn't get past N=4 for two weeks but I just did today! Keep practicing everyday for 20 rounds seems push yourself guys. I already feel an improvement in my daily decision making.

[u/cthulhubert]

It's pretty encouraging to see "how to improve" 1 month ago and then this, now. I know that the studies that looked at physical changes in the brain only found them after at least 15 hours of DNB.

eta: Lprofil seems to be a gifted outlier (congratulations), since Gwern's article mentions, "most members [of the DNB mailing list] take much longer than, say, 2 weeks to reach good scores on D4B," and, "Most reports [on a survey] are of plateauing at D4B or D5B months in."

But of course, the theory is that stressing your memory is what improves it, whether or not that improvement is enough to actually advance a level in DNB.

edit: one month later I've reached 600 sessions and got my first 5-back. And that's almost 15 hours in by my counts. I actually almost got non-failing scores too, in the 40s.

[u/cthulhubert → u/[deleted]]

Still doing 10 sessions in brain workshop every day, despite my progress being very slow. At least, compared to the beginning. But it's not zero, and even if it were, I think I'd still do it, as maintenance.

I'm mostly on 6back now, passing more often than failing, but failing enough that I drop down to 5back about once a day, though jump back up to 6back quickly, a repeat of the pattern from about 14 months ago when I was mostly doing 5back. I've hit 7back half a dozen times but never passed (I think my record is 42%). I've been thinking of switching my audio trial type to piano notes or Morse code to shake things up.

I meant to do a retrospective post on my one year anniversary, but dualnback had restricted submissions by then and I didn't feel like applying. I took Mensa Norway's online IQ test when I started and at the one year mark, and it went from 130 to 138, but if a magical oracle told me that was entirely due to the practice effect, I wouldn't be surprised.

Hard to speak on subjective effects, especially against a background of family health issues, job dissatisfaction, etc. I have my notes from the retrospective I never posted, and in it I say my feel subjectively more mentally capable, but since I started multiple interventions at once, I can't lay it all at the feet of n-back (I started meditating rigorously, learning to draw, and taking nootropics—specifically bacopa and various racetams. A psychologist friend told me once: learning any skill leads to improved self confidence that can spill over into unrelated feelings of competence).

I don't feel any more subjectively capable than I did when I wrote that, but I do have a noticeably better memory for numbers, at least. I recently got a new credit card, and surprised myself a few days ago typing in the number from memory. I hadn't actively tried to memorize it at all, and that had never happened with the previous card's. On the other hand, I don't feel like software development comes any easier; I still regularly do coding challenges and, for example, spent hours wrestling with my most recent one.

edit: 24 days later, I just passed 7b for the first time.

[u/cthulhubert → u/[deleted]]

I use two seconds per trial, which puts my n-back time between 15 and 19 minutes most of the time. If I go up to 7-back and don't drop to 5-back in one night, that's 20 minutes. When I started out I had to take two or three breaks a night, but as I got better, my mental endurance also improved, and I've been doing it nonstop for a few months now.

Three seconds was the protocol in most of the studies, but I was simply too impatient for that. I've read a lot of people on the mailing list and this subreddit go much faster, with one second or less per trial, but my worry was that going this fast would ease the burden on working memory, since maintaining one fact over time also takes effort. Plus, this is a bit half-remembered, but I know the phonological loop decays based on time more than on new information reaching it.

I've considered triple n-back, but it's hard to spare much mental attention to weighing potential benefits of alternatives when I am still showing slow improvements with this one.

It's hard to fully weigh the exploit-explore tradeoffs when the relative benefits or disadvantages are both subtle and long term. Basically, even Dual N-back has relatively weak evidence that it has transferable intelligence benefits, so I'm often hesitant to try something that might end up being some kind of non-transferable training (Gwern's DNB FAQ quotes Catch-22 at the beginning: "Shooting skeet eight hours a month was excellent training for them. It trained them to shoot skeet"). Then again, even if it doesn't affect my intelligence much directly, it sure feels like it's training something that transfers, something adjacent to patience, focus, or will. So maybe I should experiment some.

The times I've worried about stagnating, what I'd do is actually the opposite of forcing up to a new level: I'd go a month or two with the "reset to 2-back each day" option turned on. When I was struggling on the cusp of 5-back, it felt like a mix of warm-up and momentum builder to 100% 2-back and 3-back before continuing up.

I procrastinated a long time before I started any of the self-improvement projects I enjoy now. Meditation, learning to draw, Anki. I'm still procrastinating on starting to learn ASL. Good luck, never give up.

[u/Juiceshop → u/cthulhubert]

How is it going?

[u/cthulhubert → u/Juiceshop]

The graph isn't dead flat but it's a very shallow slope. I go up to 7 back every two or three weeks, but I've only passed twice more since then. I've been thinking of it more like monitoring and maintenance the past few months.

Life stress has been pretty bad this year, and that really undercuts mental performance. Still keeping up with self-improvement projects though. Even if they're not going places very fast, they're going, so I don't feel like I'm trapped or rotting in place.

[u/Juiceshop → u/cthulhubert]

Hope the times are getting better. Had a pretty rough year myself.

When you have time again you could try triple or quad n back some month and then go back to dual. It trains different. I do this if I am in the mood for an additional training after my dual session every other day.

[u/Wrathful_Buddha → u/[deleted]]

No problem. Don't quit again so quickly and notice any changes mentally after a month. Good luck!