Brain no worky

Wikipedia states “Cognition encompasses mental processes that deal with knowledge. It includes psychological activities that acquire, store, retrieve, transform, or apply information. Cognitions are a pervasive part of mental life, helping individuals understand and interact with the world.”

I think the thing I'm currently concerned with for me is the ability to retrieve information. I've found myself being like “wtf was his name?” or basically not remembering things that I've been told a few weeks ago. I've found that I have an innate ability to recognize faces. Probably an uncanny ability. Like see an actor and know that he showed up as an extra for one episode of a TV show I watched years ago. But it's starting to get harder to remember their names.

It's not that bad in that I do still remember stuff that I was told a few weeks ago. But not all of it.

So what am I doing about it?!

Firstly, having known myself and how my brain works for nearly 50 years, I know when I feel stupid, but more importantly, when I feel really quick. Playing quiz games is probably the best way to get my brain firing on all cylinders. Doing mundane work and not learning anything new is the fastest way for me to lose my mental acuity. I'm the quickest after a binge session of jeopardy episodes.

But there are other ways. Basically learning something new or doing something mentally challenging. I would say reading is something that can sharpen me up but I read all of the time, but not necessarily the most stimulating things. But long form articles about sports and politics and science.

So I'm basically doing all of the things that lead me to be sharper. As well as a bit more physical activity.

Years ago I started to learn Haskell, the purely functional programming language. I just stopped. I recently bought the physical book, “Learn You A Haskell for Great Good!”, which is an amazing title, and is available for FREE and in FULL online, but I wanted the physical book. Also I bought a poetry book. But I also bought some e-books. One is a general overview of the ECS development paradigm used in games. It's Entity Component System. And it's a relatively new way to develop games in a flexible way where you're also not losing much on performance. Another book is one about game development specifically with the engine that I started to make my game with, Ebitengine, but I don't think it will cover building a game with Ebitengine and ECS. However, there's a powerful ECS implementation in Go that is built with Ebitengine in mind, and I can use other games' code as examples to learn from.

So I have a few things going on. Learning Haskell from the start again (I'm currently on page 49 which is covering case expressions). Looking into learning more stuff to make a game because I have a few fun ideas. Reading poetry. Learning advanced architectures. Etc. It's probably not as neuron igniting as a binge of Jeopardy but it works :)