What is stroop?
Stroop a highly effective exercise that forces your cognition to surpass your automatic response. This means that when you’re reading a word for example, by what it says despite it contrasting other features of the word such as its color. Example: reading a yellow-highlighted word that says orange, therefore guessing it to be yellow. This game exercises your manual response to read a word or object for what the color of it is, rather than what it’s said to be. You will read a blue word and classify it as blue, despite its text saying otherwise. This process of training this non automatic response that scans the actual features such as color, is known as cognitive inhibition. Training this skill will transfer into other domains such as School and work-related tasks, prompting higher focus and reduced distractions, especially within short term automations.
Recommended protocol for this exericse:
- Play 5-10 minutes (relatively short, but high intensity) as a warm up for longer sessions
- Practice 2-3x a week.
- Play when in an active and calm state, otherwise take a break before resuming play activity. (Recommended to do box breathing during your break as it not only calms down your nervous system but recirculates blood, activating neural activity. )
Recommended Tips:
- Aim for 90%+ accuracy with highly intensive focus. otherwise, do not advance – maintain level or decrease.
- Fixate near the center while playing
- quick responses – yet accurate.
- Log your results: error rate, and calmness rate. if calmness levels are above an 8/10, alongside a 90%+ accuracy, do proceed to the next level of difficulty. otherwise, hold or regress.
- select the level you’re currently in skill-wise, and progress level per level in the progressive setting.
- If you’re rushing or getting slow speed with high accuracy, utilize solutions depending on these circumstances. For example, speed but inaccuracy= regress speed until accuracy is clean. Or, accurate and slow, progress speed slightly until stability. This ensures you’re skillset is balanced across all domains.
regarding difficulty:
- Difficulty increases within time limit, difficulty and decrease in obviousness of discerning words
- difficulties contained are beginner, novice, intermediate, advanced, expert, elite, God