I am wondering why I can spend so much time on memory and math training compared to other activities I can otherwise be engaged in. I seem to prefer them to even school learning. I wonder how I would have felt pre-memory training if a teacher told me I had to learn a numbered list of hundred people, their distinct actions and the objects associated with them and be able to recall up to thirty of them in a minute from only numbers presented or wrote out a list of twenty words and gave me two minutes to memorize them.
My point is that some of the things I do in memory and math training seem harder than regular school stuff but I will somehow pick brain training over school work and some other stuff any day and I do not know why​.
I’ll give one possible answer which may or may not be true for you. Memory and math training tends to have a clear, well-defined scope, with almost instant feedback: you either remembered the things correctly or didn’t. You either solved the maths problem correctly or didn’t.
This is in contrast to all those other activities and general learning topics where it’s rarely clear whether you’re really going in the right direction, nor what the optimal direction/goal even is. So when you have the choice of “study chemistry” or “memorise a deck of cards”, your brain immediately shouts “ahh the first thing is so ambiguous and vaguely threatening… let’s do the card thing, it only takes 5 minutes”.
That’s my theory anyway, after YEARS of doing coding puzzles and code golf when I told people “I’m going to build a web app and make millions”. Turned out building the web app – even just thinking about it – was more difficult than I thought, or at least, my brain got uncomfortable and diverted me towards the nice, quick, well-defined coding puzzles instead.
Not to say that memory and math training, or code golf are bad things you shouldn’t do. But, perhaps your brain is influencing you to avoid those harder, longer tasks where the next step is rarely clear, like my brain does.
Yes! For me, reason 1 for procrastinating on something is when the next step isn’t a (small) step clearly defined.
If I have to think about what would be the next vest thing to do, my motivation evaporates. Or I spend the whole time making the perfect plan, without actually making any progress.
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