I was having a pretty easy time in high-school, cruise-controlling with flying scores. Then in my early adulthood, I came to feel more stupid and slow. I think the early decline in my analytical abilities came from boredom. Until the end of high school, I had some blind motivation to think and care, I guess from some initial pool of 'motivation'. Then as I graduated, I was left with a very open ended world to deal with and no clear reason to take any specific path. And no true motivation to think through anything.
I went in the army for a while, infantry. It did help make me feel even more stupid. I developed a different motivation toward knowledge, preferring to sharpen action oriented decision making instead of analytical thinking. Might seem odd just said like that, but placed in an environment where all that matters is making roughly good decisions quickly, all the time, does unsharpen your ability to think at length.
At that point, a couple years in the army, I thought that intelligent past I had was gone. I'd look at books I used to understand easily and feel uninterested and unable to grasps anything in it.
It went like that until I found about programming. When I saw my first line of VBA (!!) while trying to make an Excel spreadsheet, I was baffled and utterly confused. I thought I was beyond my reach, but I still tried out of necessity. And eventually more and more complex constructions of VBA came within my reach. And then I understood that my lost ability to think analytically was not lost, it was just untrained. As I realized I loved programming things, I jumped into anything related I could read. All those cryptic things became understandable, now that I had motivation.
Fast-forward three years, I think I'm now much "smarter"/able than I ever was. I also perceive that my smartness has little to do with some magical gift that fades away out of my control. It seems to have much more to do with how motivated I can be about a topic.
All that to say, you shouldn't diagnose your apparent inability to think as a consequence of you becoming more stupid. You might just be demotivated and still very able, given a little practice and warm up time.
I went in the army for a while, infantry. It did help make me feel even more stupid. I developed a different motivation toward knowledge, preferring to sharpen action oriented decision making instead of analytical thinking. Might seem odd just said like that, but placed in an environment where all that matters is making roughly good decisions quickly, all the time, does unsharpen your ability to think at length.
At that point, a couple years in the army, I thought that intelligent past I had was gone. I'd look at books I used to understand easily and feel uninterested and unable to grasps anything in it.
It went like that until I found about programming. When I saw my first line of VBA (!!) while trying to make an Excel spreadsheet, I was baffled and utterly confused. I thought I was beyond my reach, but I still tried out of necessity. And eventually more and more complex constructions of VBA came within my reach. And then I understood that my lost ability to think analytically was not lost, it was just untrained. As I realized I loved programming things, I jumped into anything related I could read. All those cryptic things became understandable, now that I had motivation.
Fast-forward three years, I think I'm now much "smarter"/able than I ever was. I also perceive that my smartness has little to do with some magical gift that fades away out of my control. It seems to have much more to do with how motivated I can be about a topic.
All that to say, you shouldn't diagnose your apparent inability to think as a consequence of you becoming more stupid. You might just be demotivated and still very able, given a little practice and warm up time.