Is it possible to suddenly become dumber?

Post Reply New Topic

So many good replies here.

And yes, my cognitive abilities can go south overnight as I don't have access to parts of my brain, fluid, long term memory, and spatial. I appear confused at my worst ( that's what I heard) and other times, "you're a very bright person." This isn't age related with myself because I recall this phenomenon at age 20.

And this has affected my driving performance as well, as I can only map things in 2D, and this affects little things such as reaching for something and jamming/breaking my fingernails against the sides of something.

Overall there is a large vacillation in performance here.

Yes it happens every morning to me.....I tend to feel quite slow and stupid in the morning if I attempt to do anything complex. Its like I wake up before my brain fully wakes up.

My cognitive faculties randomly bounce around somewhat from day-to-day. It's often not clear to me why I'll have trouble with a particular skill on a given day.

I just want to add that that is exactly my experience. I kept flogging my brain when it would refuse to answer (which lead to a worsening spiral of shutdown & 'flogging'). But it took a numbers of years of doing that (constantly & intensely) before permanent losses happened. I imagine that different people could have different thresholds for that, though.

Depression can knock 30 points off an IQ test? Good lord. My "real" IQ must be about 600 because depression has been my best friend for 30+ years.

I have thought about this a lot lately and perhaps it is what the second poster in this thread wrote, that a bunch of things can probably affect you in negative ways.

I sometimes blank out halfway into thinking about something and while Im used to sometimes typing too fast and miss a letter or scramble them up, I know its because I type too fastbut lately I have noticed that I write the wrong words, like me instead of my, or thought instead of though and its happened repeatedly, almost daily for the past 2 months and Ive started wondering why that is and why so suddenly.I seem to change a letter instead of miss it, or add a letter where it doesnt belong.

Im not sure if it makes me feel much dumber, but it definitely makes me wonder whats up.

When I was younger, I had a problem with names and I could go for a good hour or two trying to remember the name of a friend I played with the previous day.This went away when I got older but I still remember how funny that felt to me.

This happened to me, although due to other issues I had breaks between brain flogging (due to exhaustion and shutdown) rather than years of constant and intense flogging. I had a series of burnouts several years ago.

These days it seems like a few hours of just about anything can get to the point of brain protest, even engaging in some of my hobbies. I know I was really pushing myself to play WoW of all things and stick to a consistent raiding schedule with my guild, and hitting and exceeding the point where my brain protested on multiple occasions. Some video games can saturate my capacity for anything in a couple of hours now.

Part of me is like "You're giving up too easily" even though I've been through this before several times with both school and work, and part of me is like, this is actually affecting my entertainment and I didn't even think of it as pushing myself even though I pushed myself pretty hard. I ended up taking a break for several months, but it was one of the things I was back to doing rather intensely when everything started falling apart late last year (although I do not think it was the primary cause).

Genius!!

Chances are, if you are prone to this kind of thing, it has already happened to you at least once, most often during the toddler years, more seldom at puberty. I have yet to hear of it happening to adults who did not have unstable skills in childhood and adolescence (unless they had an injury/illness of some sort).

Childhood disintegrative disorder is probably the most common diagnosis given to those who lose skills during the later toddler and early childhood years; those who lose skills earlier than that will generally be diagnosed with classic autism instead.

It is possible of course to mistake "falling behind" (i.e., not reaching NT milestones) for "losing skills". Most autistics simply had a different developmental schedule; this is not the same thing as unstable/variable skill levels.

Even NTs will temporarily lose access to some of their skills under extreme stress. If you haven't got a history of having to learn things more than once, chances are this is the variant that is happening to you: You learn things pretty much permanently, but you can't always use what you've learned. It's happened to me quite a lot--for example, I might lose the ability to organize myself well enough to take showers; but once my stress level goes back down, I won't have to re-learn it--it's just that I didn't have the mental resources to use a skill I had learned permanently. The more recently I learned something, the more likely I'll lose it under stress.

Depression can lower your performance on everything. I don't know precisely how much worse it makes your IQ score, or if it's known to affect specifically that (but it does cause mental fog). If an extra thirty IQ points would make your IQ 600, I'd expect to see you in the Guiness Book of World Records because you'd have to be at least 570 now, which is 31 standard deviations above the mean (to be a genius you only have to be about three standard deviations above the mean); I find this implausible.

I'm really sorry to hear you're depressed. Especially for so long.

It's also possible for minor brain damage to cause savant skills, so that could have caused it. It's also possible the test was biased or improperly administered once (or even both times).

that's an excellent point- do you think it could make 30-points-worth of difference, whether or not a person was a depressed test taker beforehand, and happy afterwards? just wondering... do you believe that maybe an interfering brain part, literally blown out of the picture, could also account for some effective boost in testable brain power?

Sure, some days I'll be able to write really well and the next day I'll find it hard to type out one coherent sentence. But I'm epileptic so it interferes with my brain a lot.
Also, I think all the medications I've been on have really screwed with my brain chemistry.
But the good news is if you keep practicing on skills they get better. If stroke victims can return to normal then anyone can, theoretically.

I've heard of it happening to people who.... may or may not have had obvious unstable skills, at the least. As in, they didn't "regress" at the expected times of infancy, toddler, or puberty. Of course I lost things both in infancy and at puberty, so... but yeah I've heard of adults who managed to really push and push and push for decades and then finally fell apart at 30, 40, 50, etc. But usually there are other signs. Not necessarily signs of obviously unstable skills, but other things.

Well, I was figuring 30 points for 30 years. That's 900. With some fudge factor, 600 seemed a good guess.




Meh. I've lived two thirds of a male's expected life. I'm past the halfway point. I'll be dead in less time than the total I've spent depressed. Then I won't be depressed any more.

I became dumber after having children, can't focus or work things out like I could before.

I didn't, as far as I know, lose any skills in childhood or during puberty. But after pushing myself socially for most of the 90s, dealing with a failed relationship, trying to go to school and work (although these were more punctuated than sustained), and then managing to find work I could do consistently in the late 90s-early 2000s, I managed to hit a burnout period and ... well, a lot of things seem to be harder than they used to be - and this feels like it's not precisely across the board, but did hit a lot of things. My capacity for socializing is significantly lower than when I was at my best (and lower again these past few months than even last summer, but I didn't actually lose skills, I just managed to undo the ability to place them in context, I think).

No idea if I have any of those other signs, though.