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.

user:	quark83
created:	September 12, 2013
karma:	29