Preliminary data on the blood glucose/mental performance ‘study’

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s the introduction.

I haven’t done as many sessions as I’d have liked, but at this point n is equal to 50 so I figured I might as well give you a scatter plot with the performance data so far:

Without the 2100+ performance at 17 mmol/l (the far right data point) R^2 would be 0,1463 – so n is still way too low to draw any conclusions. Perhaps aside from the fact that I don’t think the pattern looks completely random.

I’ve become aware of the fact that there are just loads of omitted variables here (nearby road work done with extensive use of pneumatic drills being one of the major ones in the beginning) and it would take a lot of data to take them all into account.

I’ve also realized by now that the tactics trainer performance is not a super great tool to pick up on variation in mental ability, though I maintain it’s not completely crazy to use it as a proxy. A significant number of the problems during a session are either repeats or quite similar to other problems solved in the past, and I remember those patterns just as well with a high blood glucose as with a lower one. So most of the variation in performance is around a set baseline, and how much I deviate from that baseline depends on how many ‘new’ problems – where I actually do have to think a bit – are introduced during a session. My performance is quite sensitive to the type of problems presented during a session and to which degree new problems/themes are introduced – the performance can easily vary with 200 points or more if I do two sessions ten minutes apart.