At one point in the 1990's, I asked my shrink if he could arrange for me to have cognitive testing to see if I was bright enough to be a software engineer. He referred me to a PhD in neurology, who gave me some tests that were useless. The guy normally tested people who had suffered severe brain injuries, such as people who had had motorcycle accidents while not wearing a helmet, to see if they could function in society. I passed with flying colors, (as would anyone above the bottom 5%) which told me absolutely nothing about whether I was sharp enough to be a software engineer. And the test cost $600 which insurance didn't cover.

In 2004, I tried switching to Lamictal from my previous cocktail, because my shrink believed that it would be better for my body, and particularly that it would help me lose weight.

I failed badly at the project I was on at work, and was removed from the project in disgrace. I immediately called my shrink and switched back onto my previous cocktail.

Where did this leave me? I wasn't sure that Lamictal was the culprit, there were many possible explanations for my failure on the project. But the possible damage to my career was too great to repeat the experiment.

What was needed was a cheap, convenient way to test my own intelligence, so that I could try a med, and if it slowed me down mentally, find that out before it wreaked havoc on my career. And I found one.

There is a website, Happy Neuron that has a lot of video games on it that you can use to test yourself. I am writing this in 2020, and I haven't used it since experimenting with a new med in 2011, and it's changed a lot, so this description may be out of date.

Happy Neuron provided video games for adults. There were 4 games in each of 5 categories, where each category stimulated a different part of the brain. Back in 2011, their primary focus was on elderly people who wanted to stimulate themselves mentally to stave off dementia. It was designed to be a "workout" that was "good for your brain", not to be a way to measure intelligence.

In 2011, I decided I wanted to have another try at Lamictal. This time, I would monitor my intelligence with Happy Neuron games so that I would detect any impairment before it showed up in the form of career damage.

Before starting on the new drug, I played Happy Neuron games for a couple of hours a weekend for several weeks. I chose multiple games in each of the 5 categories, and used only games that would be finished in a short time, and which gave scores that were fine-grained enough that a 10% decline in ability would be noticeable. After choosing my set of tests, playing them weekly, and keeping a record of my scores, I reached a level where my scores had stabilized and I wasn't improving much any more. That established by baseline.

There are a couple of unfortunate things about using Happy Neuron for this purpose:

Firstly, it is meant to be a workout, not a test. So if you play a game you've played a lot before, Happy Neuron remembers your previous score and adjusts the difficulty level of the games to make them more of a challenge for you, which is totally unacceptable for a test. So you have to write down in your records the skill level you're testing at for each game, and always manually adjust them to the same level every time you play.

Secondly, Happy Neuron was always telling me that I sucked. They always showed me my performance compared to other people playing the game. The problem was, I'd be playing the games once a week, not because I enjoyed them (I don't like video games), but to test myself. But most of the other people playing the game were doing it because they liked the game, so they were doing it over and over, many times per day. So my scores always looked really bad compared to the average. This could be very bad for someone with less self-confidence in their intelligence who might become depressed by being constantly told they're an idiot.

Then I started ramping up Lamictal, playing my 2 hours of Happy Neuron games every weekend. I observed no impairment, even when on very, very aggressive doses of the new drug.

So now I know that in 2004, my poor performance at work was not due to adding Lamictal to my drug cocktail, it was caused by some other factor of the project. At least now I know that, and it's certainly worth knowing. And I never would have made the second attempt at Lamictal without a good way to test myself.

There is another, similar product out, 'lumosity.com'. It is almost exactly like Happy Neuron, except for one fatal flaw – you can't manually adjust the difficulty level of the games – the product does it automatically for you, based on the history of your scores. This is fine if all you want is a “mental workout”, but it renders Lumosity worthless as a tool to test yourself for medication-induced changes of intelligence.

Treatment for bipolar illness has come a long way since the 1980's, there are now many mood stabilizers to choose from. Now, thanks to Happy Neuron, I can assess whether a new medication is making me dumber or smarter, and gather that information quickly, long before irreparable damage is done to my career. This will be very valuable in evaluating new and better drugs as they come along, without undue risk in the workplace.