A word in your ear?
i figured something out whilst i was making a futile attempt to sleep last night, i think i'm getting stupider ... i have a lack of interlectual stimulation up here... i belive that you are one of the few friends of mine that will undestand where i'm coming from and might have some form of insight that i missed during my insomnaic musings.
Well, yes. I certainly have a little experience in this area.
A quick proviso, for those who don't know: I'm crazy smart, like off the chart - everything I say is a work of art.
Glad that's outta the way.
On a more serious not, the last time I felt really intellectually stimulated on a regular basis was when I was still attending Poole Grammar School, in years 8 and 9. That was also the last time I recall doing my homework with any real regularity. Break and lunch times were not a fun experience(see: bullying), and I escaped that by going to the library and working as hard as I could. I avoided beatings and finished everything so that I could just watch TV when I got home. That was pretty sweet.
Once I left PGH and joined The Purbeck School, I slowly began to make more friends. I did start by still doing homework in the library, but as lunchtimes and breaks became funtimes(at least more often than not, see: a certain someone putting my books up trees) I started to socialise more, and work less. That would have been fine if I could have done the work at home, instead, but I was so used to being able to watch TV after school that I didn't want to stop.
That was the start of my acedemic decline, and the root of my terrible A-Level results.
Through it all, though, I never felt like I was getting 'stupider'. Barring major head injuries or massive doses of ketamine(or other), I'm not too sure that's possible. People say that the mind is like a muscle, and that you need to train it to keep your faculties at their best. I don't really subscribe to that thinking, either. The brain isn't a muscle, it's a bunch of pathways - some people have more pathways than others, and more links between them and those people are smarter. Just because you don't walk down those paths as much as you used to, doesn't mean they aren't still there.
I should say that this doesn't rule out that people can get smarter. To go back to my bad metaphor, I totally think that you can build new paths, or learn shortcuts between your current ones and become a more intelligent person. I just don't think you can become less smart.
So why does my anonymous friend with a problem feel like they are getting stupider?
My route to University can go three, maybe four ways. One across a field, one through the town center, one through an industrial estate, and one that's a mix of all three. I've gotten used to going through the park. It's the quickest way, and therefore it's the bare minimum I need to do to accomplish my goal of getting to Uni.
I'd say that my friend is in the same situation, sort of. They are also at Uni, doing a fairly hard course, but I'd wager that that one journey through the park is starting to get a little boring, and making them feel stagnant. It's still work, but now it's become a baseline, a minimum. With my journey to Uni I can switch up the way I take when I get a little bored - it's hard to do that with assigned work at an academic institution.
My recommendation is to start making more journeys. Do more things that stretch your legs, give you a different view. Get the stuff for uni out of the way, and work on your own projects, things that interest you, things that are hard, that you think you might not even be able to do.
Be more creative. Which, incidentally, I know you can be.
I felt pretty crappy about how my brain was doing at the start of last year, so I set myself a goal - to write this blog, everyday for the year. I didn't achieve the goal, and that's fine, because along the way I found that every now and then I'd write something that was really great, something that pushed my brain, that was hard to do.
My own personal god, Zefrank has a whole bunch of videos on creativity. Here are two that I think really help in this situation:
I've moved this from "how do I feel less stupid" to "how do I make more stuff" because I think creativity and your own image of your intellectual ability are linked in a powerful way. The things we create are physical representations of what we have inside our head - we are wired to deal with physicality, with the 3-D, the tangible. We need these things we create to reinforce our own abilities. I'm sure right now, anonymous, that all you're creating is work for Uni, and that's leaving you thinking that your brain is only able to do one thing right now, that it's getting stagnant.
Well, stir it up.
Hope this helps.