My observations:

1. The first task I used to measure my mental function at frequent intervals (e.g., every 30 minutes) resembled an typical cognitive psych task. It wasn’t fun and I had to push myself to do it.

2. I made another test to do the same thing based on the lessons I drew from bilboquet. It consisted of tracking circles around the screen. It was mildly fun.

3. Trying to improve the second test, I made a third test, which consisted of “tossing” the cursor from one point to another — like throwing darts. In spite of its simplicity, it was/is a lot of fun. Slightly addictive.

My theory of human evolution places great emphasis on hobbies (which at first were varieties of tool making) and job specialization. Hobbies must be fun. So that we will do them — or at least so our Stone Age ancestors would do them — they must provide pleasure. Where does this pleasure come from? The third task suggests a source: We enjoy simple hand-eye tasks with feedback where there is plenty of room for improvement. The Stone-Age hobbyist is trying to get this or that stone or piece of wood to do what he wants. The importance of job specialization — people must be able to enjoy a wide range of jobs, and the first jobs derived from hobbies — implies that the pleasure derived from hobbies must be “free-floating.” It cannot be closely tied to any particular hobby; to encourage a wide range of hobbies (= a wide range of tools) it must be generated by a wide range of hobbies. Because it is free-floating, we should be able to generate it from something quite different from a Stone-Age hobby, such as my third test. The Stone-Age hobbies we’re talking about, ur-technology, involved making things — which involves hand-eye coordination. The third test was more fun than the first two because it was closer to a Stone-Age hobby.

I don’t yet know if the third test is sensitive to flaxseed oil. I have doubts because it seems to involved only a small amount of mental computation per minute of testing. I believe flaxseed oil improves all brain function, but this test may require too much time (e.g., 20 minutes per session) to see the effect clearly. The other tests show the effect and take about 3 minutes per test. One reason balance clearly showed an effect of flaxseed oil is, I think, that it is computationally very intensive. A huge amount of computation goes on at once. A kind of averaging goes on, making systematic differences larger relative to noise.

Part 1. Part 2.