u/biopsychonaut

I’m on a creatine, caffeine, Lion’s mane, electrolytes, Ashwagandha stack for focus and memory. I’ve been pretty satisfied with my cognitive performance and settled on this stack because it’s simple and works. I’ve taken it a step further and used cognitive training to sharpen my mind because focus and memory aren’t enough. I train daily on an online program I created that trains my brain to adapt faster and see progress daily.

There’s a gap between research and health performance when it comes to cognitive training. The research favors it but the performance coaching doesn’t emphasize it at all. You can optimize for focus with nootropics, sure, but you’re best off pairing your stack with a behavioral intervention that will stretch your cognitive bandwidth. The way protein and creatine give your muscles the raw power to grow, but don’t make you stronger alone, goes for nootropics too. Nootropics are raw materials; cognitive training is the tension.

I track my cognitive training numbers every day. Some days the improvement is obvious and others are flat but I can see the trend of my speed and accuracy improving. Before you run off to Lumosity or another brain training app you should know that researchers have torn them apart because they gamify the science to the point of uselessness. My online training is based on a validated neuroscience task, and I follow a four-day-on, three-day-off training schedule to let the adaptation consolidate (same logic as rest days for muscles).

If you’re already doing the supplement side, what’s your equivalent of “training under tension” for your brain? 

I built a web-based abstract reasoning task called Lattice (https://lattice.cogello.com) to solve a problem. Raven’s matrices are the best measure of fluid reasoning but they’re locked in clinics and don’t have millisecond precision. Meanwhile, online alternatives are gamified into uselessness. Lattice is research-grade and designed for repeated measurement.

Participants see three cards, infer the pattern across color, shape and quantity, then pick the match from three options. The task consists of 18 trials: 4 easy, 10 medium, 4 hard. Each trial records accuracy, response time to the millisecond, difficulty band, and quality metadata. Every session is reproducible (seeded). Exports as CSV or JSON with transparent schema.

I’m looking for people who want to validate this tool, including test-retest reliability, convergent validity against Raven’s or other fluid reasoning measures, item analysis, or differential functioning. I’m also open to feedback on the data structure itself.

I can give you gated research access (Lattice Pro) with automated advanced data export.

I recently finished my Master’s in neuroscience and realized that abstract reasoning is the ghost metric everyone’s chasing. Researchers, hiring managers and admissions committees are all trying to measure if you can solve problems you’ve never seen. In research we call it fluid intelligence. At work you think of it as learning velocity. Your teacher back in grade school might have called it creativity.

I built a free research-grade measure of abstract reasoning as a fast way to assess the ghost metric without the time and expense of a clinic-based neuropsych evaluation: Lattice (https://lattice.cogello.com). You can use it to get your abstract reasoning baseline, track performance over time, or screen for learning velocity.

I’m curious: what should we do with abstract reasoning performance data? How do you see it changing research, hiring, performance training and/or biohacking?

Disclosure: Lattice is made by Cogello, a startup. It’s free and always will be. There’s also a researcher-gated version (Lattice Pro) if you’re running studies and need password-protected participant access and automated data export.

I went to grad school for neuroscience because of my interests in memory, attention, and cognitive training. I have spent time with lab rats and biohackers who spend absurd amounts of time and resources dialing in their nutrition, exercise, and supplement plans while making sure their Whoop bands and Oura rings track every lifestyle change. I hardly ever meet anyone like me who is obsessed with cognitive and brain health.

I feel like an n = 1 but I know I can’t be the only one who finds it strange that the health performance space defaults to tracking steps, sleep, HRV, VO2 max, macros, and countless other stats, while mental performance takes a back seat. I know from my studies that mental skills like cognitive flexibility, abstract reasoning, attentional control, and several others are predictors of academic performance, emotion regulation, resilience, and more. The research on this topic is deep but the cultural awareness is practically nonexistent.

I’m curious whether others here measure and/or train their cognitive performance. 

Why is cognitive performance so underrated in the health performance space?

I shared a free cognitive test here a few weeks ago and it brought hundreds of visitors to the site.

I’m finishing my Master’s in neuroscience at Columbia where I’ve researched executive function training. Raven’s Progressive Matrices is one of the most well-validated measures of fluid intelligence ever developed.

Lattice (https://lattice.cogello.com) is a free digital pattern reasoning task built as an extension of that research.

• Each puzzle requires you to identify a rule across color, shape, and quantity simultaneously.
• Difficulty scales across 18 trials so that the task stays sensitive across a wide range of ability.
• Response time is captured to the millisecond.

You get a full performance breakdown after completing it.

Disclosure: Lattice is a product of Cogello, a startup. It’s free, no account needed, no strings attached.