notes-science-neuro-mentalStats

  focus

can you focus on what you want to be thinking about?

  discrete workspace

you can hold in your mind discrete things like a graph of nodes and the arrows connecting them, or like a tree of conversational topic history, or a stack representating the current conversational topics and sub-topics. Presumably different people can hold more or less of these things in their mind

  wit

are you witty?

  recall

can you remember things?

  correctness

not making mistakes

  boiling down to fundamentals, intuitive, also creation of categories

given a bunch of information and theories about some topic, can you boil it down to fundamentals, and create fundamental categories to sort it into? Can you get an intuition about it?

  analysis (formulating a formal question to answer an informal problem)

often when you read about famous mathematical or physical techniques, you see that at the core of it, someone took a informal or practical problem, and realized that the crux of the problem was a question, and then they formalized that question.

  associative breadth

that is, when there are two things that are very different from each other or which are encountered in very different contexts or domains, but that have some interesting similarity, and you already know about one of them and are told about the other, how likely are you to make the connection?

  speed

how fast can you think?

  parallelization

how many things can you think about at once?

how long does it take you to switch between them?

as you get too many things, how fast does your forgetfulness or error rate or lack of focus increase?

  working memory nonforgetfulness

how (un)likely is it that when there's something you try to remember, but you can't write it down, and you have to do something else for just a minute, that you'll forget the thing you were trying to remember? could also consider long term memory nonforgetfulness, episodic, semantic

  time to learn, episodic, semantichow much time/how many repetitions does it take you before you stop forgetting the thing you are trying to learn, and learn it?

  perceptual and working memory detailwhen you have an image in your visual working memory, how detailed can it get? auditory working memory? and so on for the other modalities

  mental stamina

when you don't feel like thinking about something (it's boring, you're having trouble focusing) but you try to make yourself, how much do you succeed at that?

   willpower?can you make yourself do unpleasant things in general? but willpower may be more of a 'character stat' rather than a 'mental stat' so perhaps it shouldn't be on this list

 skill recallwhen you are trying to learn a skill, or to train yourself to remember to do something in a certain context, how often do you do this successfully? e.g. when you forget your keys, that's a failure

 skill/reinforcement learning speed(s)when you are trying to learn a skill, or to train yourself to remember to do something in a certain context, or to change your behavior in a certain context, how much time/how many repetitions does it take you to learn it/change?

 visual/linguistic connection?how good are you at making connections between and switching between visual and lingusitic modes of thinking?