The New IQ: Use Your Working Memory to Think Stronger, Smarter, Faster

The New IQ: Use Your Working Memory to Think Stronger, Smarter, Faster Tracy Alloway Ross Alloway Working memory – a bigger asset than IQWorking memory – your ability to work with information – influences nearly everything you do.What if you could find a way to better handle a hectic schedule or expertly manage risks? What if you could gain an advantage in climbing the career ladder or in sports? What if there were a way to improve your outlook on life, and face each day with more optimism and confidence?Tracy and Ross Alloway, leading experts, show how working memory is the key to all that and more. They present important and recent breakthroughs in the field, including research on how Facebook can become ‘Smartbook’, how working memory can improve your children’s marks, how it changes as you age, and how working memory is linked with ADHD, autism, dyslexia, and Alzheimer’s.But here’s the best news: You can improve your working memory! This book will give you three tests to find out how good your working memory is – and over 50 targeted exercises so you can sharpen it.‘The New IQ’ offers unprecedented insight into one of the most important cognitive breakthroughs in recent years – a vital new approach to making your brain stronger, smarter and faster. Dedication (#ulink_024789d1-6169-53b3-bd63-b5e33a9c0c2e) For our little heroes, M. and M. Note to Readers Names and identifying details of some of the people portrayed in this book have been changed, and some people portrayed are composites or are created for illustrative purposes. CONTENTS Title Page (#u791afada-d381-5034-8e67-de9aed9846a3) Dedication (#ueb6286d9-595f-562c-a193-7784489cae92) Preface (#ubb900e93-4689-58ed-a456-9f7c2e783172) PART I: The New IQ and You (#u5a8ac8e5-5822-5308-85b5-f129a244234c) 1. Welcome to the Working Memory Revolution (#ub613e61c-d9b8-5e57-ac4a-66b658284ddc) 2. Why Working Memory Is Crucial to Success (#ue80854d3-0353-55a4-9c25-c5526ae14684) 3. The Joker in the Mines—How Working Memory Makes Us Happier (#u0a7b7ce0-cb0f-5bc8-adb9-c18559710615) 4. Failures, Bad Habits, and Missteps (#ub760cf35-eb7b-5de3-9a54-0d1ef974d829) 5. The Most Important Learning Tool— Working Memory in School (#u741637d5-e6ef-5a49-a244-465f31d8fd02) 6. The New Mind-Body Connection—Working Memory in Sports (#litres_trial_promo) PART II: Growing and Improving Working Memory (#litres_trial_promo) 7. Working Memory Across the Life Span (#litres_trial_promo) 8. Working Memory Training 101 (#litres_trial_promo) 9. Secrets of Working Memory Specialists (#litres_trial_promo) 10. Feed Your Brain, Fuel Your Working Memory (#litres_trial_promo) 11. Seven Habits to Supercharge Working Memory … and a Few to Avoid (#litres_trial_promo) PART III: The Future and Past of Working Memory (#litres_trial_promo) 12. Designing the World for Working Memory (#litres_trial_promo) 13. The Dawn of Working Memory (#litres_trial_promo) Footnotes (#litres_trial_promo) Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo) Working Memory Quick Hits Manual (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo) About the Authors (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) PREFACE (#ulink_7e69c8c5-8b6f-55f5-ae04-06ae316da62a) Intelligence That Matters (#ulink_7e69c8c5-8b6f-55f5-ae04-06ae316da62a) Does IQ matter? Perhaps it may matter to your school; perhaps to an employer when hiring, but does it really matter to you? This number—somewhere between 85 to 115 for most of us—seems to have lost its significance. Of course, you may be pleased to find that your number is closer to 115, but if you found that it was closer to 85, would you be all that concerned? If you answered “no” or “probably not”, you’re not alone. In an age when nearly any factoid can be had at a few taps of the keyboard, IQ—a measure of intelligence synonymous with the accumulation of information readily available on Google—seems outdated and even quaint in the context of everyday life. Is a 115 going to make it easier for you to cook dinner, help the kids with their homework, and answer the phone at the same time? Does a 115 help you find happiness when things aren’t going your way? Will a 115 help you manage stress or resist the chocolate ?clair? Will it give you a compelling response to the surprise question in the interview? The answer is no. The world we live in, the world that matters to us, demands a new conception of intelligence. This book is about an intelligence that helps you succeed in the small things that comprise the ebb and flow of your life—like adapting a PowerPoint presentation for a new client, negotiating a treaty between warring offspring, and juggling football practise with the new product deadline. This intelligence is also deeply implicated in those meaningful moments as well, like when you were tongue-tied upon meeting the love of your life, or when you controlled your panic and found your five-year-old in the toy section, or when you came to accept the loss of a job and took the first step toward a new career. This book is about intelligence that matters. PART I (#ulink_d221c0f5-a379-5713-af6f-5d578c0e4ff6) The New IQ and You (#ulink_d221c0f5-a379-5713-af6f-5d578c0e4ff6) 1 (#ulink_d54e428e-e1a4-5cba-bca1-0d5432a20e34) Welcome to the Working Memory Revolution (#ulink_d54e428e-e1a4-5cba-bca1-0d5432a20e34) IN DECEMBER 2005, a broker on the Tokyo stock exchange sold 610,000 shares of a company called J-Com, for the low, low price of 1 yen, an amount less than a penny. The problem is that he meant to sell one single share for 610,000 yen. Epic oops. In 2001, a London dealer sold 300 million pounds sterling’ worth of shares when he intended to sell only 3 million pounds. The trade sparked a panic in the market that caused 30 billion pounds to go up in smoke. Brokers may process mountains of information when deciding what to sell and buy, but in the heat of the moment, all it takes is just one extra piece of information—the ring of a phone, the flash of a screen, the thrill of being responsible for such a large sum of money—and their focus is lost. No longer able to process all the information, they struggle to check orders carefully. Trading is a profession that places high demands on a foundational cognitive skill called working memory. By working memory advantage, we mean that this skill gives you a leg up, a boost in life. As you will discover, working memory offers you an advantage in a huge range of activities: from the everyday, like giving an important presentation at work, to the extreme, like ripping down an eighty-foot wave. It helped our evolutionary ancestors to advance from just surviving to thriving. It enabled our technological trajectory: from a bone club used for bashing to an iPhone used for connecting. By ignoring, overloading, or undermining your working memory, you put yourself at a huge disadvantage. But by focusing on your working memory, taking it into account, and improving it, the sky’s the limit. We wrote this book in order to give everyone an opportunity to take advantage of this life-changing skill. In the past decade, research on working memory has exploded. It is fast emerging as one of the most widely researched cognitive functions of the twenty-first century, and we have been leading participants in much of this research. Tracy developed a groundbreaking and highly accurate standardized working memory test for use by educators and has dedicated much of her research career to investigating the role of working memory in education and learning difficulties. Ross has focused his attention on developing exercises to improve working memory, and as the CEO and founder of Memosyne, Ltd., he developed working-memory-training software called Jungle Memory that has been used by thousands of students. Together, they have examined the role of working memory in a variety of contexts, such as how it changes when you get older; how it is linked to happiness; how it relates to lying; how it is affected by activities like barefoot running; and how it is influenced by social media like Facebook. What Is Working Memory? Working memory is our ability to work with information. More precisely, working memory is the conscious processing of information. By conscious, we mean that the information is on your mind. You are giving attention to it, shining a mental spotlight on it, concentrating on it, or making decisions about it. You are also intentionally ignoring everything else. If you are thinking about a stock trade, for example, you are filtering out the ringing phones, the jabbering of your coworkers, and the excitement of placing a $1 million order. By processing, we mean that you are manipulating the information, working with it, making calculations with it, or reformulating it. The classic example of a job that requires a strong working memory is that of an air traffic controller, whose job is to maintain the safe and orderly flow of air traffic. With hundreds of planes taking off and landing every hour, an air traffic controller must have the mental agility to process multiple variables, such as equipment, weather patterns, traffic volume, precise communication with pilots, and quick calculations. In times of emergency, they must be able to make split-second decisions while effectively moderating the stress of knowing that the lives of pilots and passengers are in their hands. We see a strong working memory giving us an advantage at play in many aspects of everyday life too. It allows you to listen to your spouse while checking your smart phone and making pancakes for the kids. It lets you complete a complicated spreadsheet in spite of interruptions from your constantly ringing phone and the din of annoyingly loud coworkers. Working memory gives you the ability to remain focused on the conversation with your dinner date while ignoring the urge to check the hockey score on your mobile. Working Memory in the Brain For more than the past decade, scientists have been using advanced brain imaging to examine how working memory functions in the brain. Their results reveal that using working memory involves a number of areas in the brain. On the next page are some of the major players: Major Players in Working Memory Prefrontal cortex (PFC): The PFC is the home of working memory. Located in the front of the brain, the PFC coordinates with other areas of the brain through electrical signals and receives information from those regions so your working memory can make use of it. Brain-imaging scans show that when working memory is being used, the PFC glows while it fires thoughts to and works with information from the different brain regions. Working memory is the primary function of the PFC. Though the PFC is the area most often associated with working memory, it is important to note that scientists have also found activation in other areas of the brain, such as the parietal cortex and the anterior cingulate, when people perform a working memory task. Hippocampus: The hippocampus is where the vast amount of knowledge you have acquired over your lifetime is housed for long-term storage. It is the location of long-term memory (LTM). Your working memory allows you to sift through all the information you have stored in your long-term memory, and pull out the bits most relevant to the task at hand. It gives you the ability to combine that stored knowledge with new information coming in, and to put new information into your long-term memory. Amygdala: The amygdala is the brain’s emotional center. When you are experiencing a strong emotion, like fear, your amygdala is activated. Working memory is also important to emotional control, managing the emotional information coming from the amygdala and preventing it from distracting you from the task you’re working on. If someone yells “Fire!” in the cinema, your working memory would help you to control the fear coming from your amygdala so that you can exit in an orderly fashion without creating a panic. Intraparietal sulcus: Located at the top back portion of the brain, the intraparietal sulcus is the brain’s math center. When you need to perform calculations, such as in choosing the best mortgage loan or guesstimating how many more miles you can go on a quarter tank of gas, your working memory relies on it to get the answer. In fact, the intraparietal sulcus is so important to math skills that when researchers used mild electrical currents in order to take it offline, participants struggled to perform simple math tasks, like deciding whether 4 was bigger than 2. Broca’s area: Situated on the left side of the frontal lobes, Broca’s area is involved in language comprehension and verbal fluency. Whenever you are writing or interacting with friends, family, colleagues, or a love interest, your working memory is processing information sent from this area. Whether you are a quick-witted verbal gymnast or you tend to stumble over your words depends in part on the strength of your working memory. We recently saw this play out at a wedding when the best man stood up to give the toast and then realized he had left his notes in the car. Instead of stumbling over a bunch of “ums” and “uhs,” his working memory and Broca’s area worked together to help him craft an eloquent, heartfelt toast on the spot. What Working Memory Is Not Whenever we give a presentation about working memory, someone in the audience raises his hand and asks, “Isn’t that the same as short-term memory?” The answer is an unequivocal no. Short-term memory is the ability to remember information, such as someone’s name at a party, this person’s occupation, or the title of a recommended book, for a very short period. We usually don’t keep this information in mind for long—a few seconds or so—and we would typically struggle to recall that person’s name or the book title the following day. Working memory gives us the ability to do something with the information at hand rather than just remember it briefly. Let’s say you’re at a business event and you meet Keith, a small-business consultant who mentions that anybody trying to start a business absolutely must read The Essential Entrepreneur by Smarticus McSmarty. You instantly recall that your friend Theresa is thinking about launching a new business venture, and you jot down the book’s title so you can send her a text about it later. Your working memory is what helps you recall, from long-term memory, that Theresa wants to start a business and combine that with the new information that the book is great for entrepreneurs. Working memory is also different from long-term memory. Long-term memory is the library of knowledge you have accumulated over the years—knowledge about countries, information about random news facts, memories about events from your school days, and even those annoying advertising jingles you heard on TV when you were a kid. Information may remain stored in your long-term memory for anywhere from a few days to many decades. Working memory is what allows you to access that information and put it to good use. You can pull out information from your long-term memory, use that information in the moment, and then file it away again. Working memory is also the mechanism used to transfer new information into long-term memory, as when you are learning a new language. Working Memory as a Conductor You can think of working memory as your brain’s Conductor. A conductor of music brings all the different instruments of an orchestra under control. Without the conductor, the result is a cacophony: the piccolo might tweet when the piano was supposed to play or the violins might be drowned out by a thundering percussion section. When the conductor walks out on the stage, chaos is brought to order. In a similar way, your working memory gives you the advantage of control over the daily information onslaught: the emails, the ringing phones, the schedule that is constantly changing, the new math lesson that must be learned, your friend’s disheartening Facebook update, the Twitter updates, the presentation that must be rapidly assembled for a potential client. In this ocean of information, where everything seems to be equally important, your working memory Conductor has two main functions: 1 It prioritizes and processes information, allowing you to ignore what is irrelevant and work with what is important. 2 It holds on to information so you can work with it. Throughout this book, we occasionally refer to working memory as the Conductor, or the working memory Conductor, when discussing these functions. For an illustration of how the working memory Conductor can give you an advantage at work, imagine for a moment that you are Mark, a middle manager in Microsoft’s Tablet PC division, and the Tablet has been taking a beating from the iPad 700, which projects holograms. iPad 700 users love seeing their pictures and spreadsheets in three dimensions. You’re called to a meeting where an inventor takes out a tablet called the FeelPad that can give holograms mass. FeelPad users can project images that can be touched and felt, not just seen. You are truly amazed. And because you are lower down the pecking order, you can just sit back and be enthralled because no one ever asks you a question at these meetings. Until today. Bill Gates turns and looks directly at you. “Mark, will this give our tablet an edge?” It is at this moment that you realize Gates mistakenly thinks you are the product manager. Your amygdala, the emotional heart of your brain, surges with terror. You can correct him, but then you know your career won’t go anywhere. Or you can go with the flow and see where it leads. The Conductor takes over, and you decide to take a risk. Because you don’t know much about the FeelPad’s technology, you have to work with what you have just heard and cobble together an answer that combines the key features of the technology and how you think it will fit into the marketplace. “Well,” you say, “I think that the brand recognition of the iPad 700 is so formidable that it will mean considerable financial investment to make a dent in Apple’s sales, but if the FeelPad can really make projections come to life, we may have a real iPad killer on our hands.” “Great,” says Bill. “Apple wants to look at the technology too, and the inventor is giving us one day to make an offer. You have ten minutes to decide if we need to buy it.” Ten minutes? You go back to your cubicle to formulate a plan. That isn’t enough time to come up with a detailed proposal, but it is enough time to assemble the most important technological information, market analyses, programming issues, and budget projections. Shutting out the ringing phone, the blinking email notice, and the low-level chatter, you modify a product launch plan with which you are already familiar and show that with the right software and viral marketing programs, the FeelPad can crush the iPad 700. Bill likes your plan so much that he makes you the project manager, and within a year, the FeelPad single-handedly turns around Microsoft’s fortunes and you are promoted to vice president of new product development. Congratulations! This remarkable change of fortune is a consequence of your Conductor working at optimum levels. It allowed you to pull out relevant information that you already knew, like product launch plans, and allowed you to synthesize it with the potential requirements of the new device. It also kept you on task and blocked distracting information, such as the ringing phone, the office chatter, and the surging fear that you may blow this opportunity. It allowed you to keep in mind the hardware, software, and finance data. It also allowed you to hold on to the information long enough to structure your plan. What Working Memory Helps You Do in Your Daily Life Working memory gives you the advantage of managing information in your day-to-day life from the time you’re born until your golden years. Here is a quick preview of just a few of the many ways it helps you. We will explore many of these in much greater detail throughout the book. Prioritize Information A strong working memory helps you manage the stream of emails, texts, Facebook status updates, Tweets, and phone messages pouring into your life. Your Conductor allows you to process and prioritize all those data so you can quickly respond to the most important things first, make a mental note to deal with some things later, and efficiently shuffle the junk to the trash. Focus on the Important Stuff Life is filled with disruptions, and working memory helps us pay attention to what really matters. Torkel Klingberg of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden found that one of the important features of working memory is to selectively filter out distractions so we can focus on relevant information. For example, as we were putting the final touches on this book, we had a small electrical fire, our car died and had to be towed away, our refrigerator threw in the towel (resulting in mild food poisoning), and our babysitter had to take the entire week off due to a family emergency, leaving us with two rambunctious boys clamoring for our attention when we were supposed to be working. Working memory helped us deal with the emergencies, create a schedule to watch our sons, and then quickly shift our attention back to the book so we could finish and click the send button in time to meet our deadline. Think Fast on Your Feet You’ve got an interview for your dream sales job, and you are totally prepared for it—you’ve researched the firm, its clients, its competition, and its sales strategies. But the interviewer throws you for a loop with a wacky question out of the middle of nowhere: “You’re meeting a client in an industrial estate with a gated parking lot. Where do you park?” “Huh?” You hesitate, then your working memory digs into your recent memory vault to recall that the interviewer had pointed to her car—backed into the parking space next to the exit gate—during your interview, and you quickly figure that where she parks is where she would want you to park, so you say, “I’d park right next to the exit.” Ding, ding, ding! You get the job. Take Smarter Risks Your Conductor helps you zero in on the most essential information when weighing the pros and cons of any potentially risky venture and helps keep you from blindly going with the flow or following the crowd. For example, when that Facebook initial public offering you invested in takes an immediate nosedive, it’s your working memory that helps you decide whether to dump your stock or hold on to it. Learn More Easily in School Kids use their Conductor every time they set foot in the classroom. It helps them to inhibit distracting information—like their classmates whispering near them—and to keep track of where they are in multistep tasks. It also allows them to access all the information they need, such as numbers or words, to complete an assignment. And, it lets them hold that information in mind and complete the tasks as quickly as possible. Make Judgment Calls Making quick decisions about your likes and dislikes, as well as how to act in certain situations, is a working-memory-intensive task. It may come as a surprise that even judging attractiveness relies heavily on working memory. When you spot someone across a bar, your working memory riffles through your hippocampus Rolodex for previous references of beautiful people. Then your working memory allows you to hold this information in mind while you compare the new person with the mental image and make a decision: Hot or not? The same process occurs as you decide whether you like a horror movie. Does the monster on screen measure up to the others stored in your hippocampus? As far as actions go, your working memory is in control. If you get into a car accident and the other driver jumps out of his car and starts coming toward you in an aggressive manner, your working memory helps you quickly run through various scenarios to determine whether it’s better for you to get out of the car or lock your door and call 911. Adapt to New Situations Have you ever wondered why some people who get laid off, divorced, or move across the country for a job transfer manage to land on their feet and thrive while others struggle to find their way? A strong working memory is the key to being able to switch gears and reinvent your career, jump back into the dating pool after years of marriage, or create a new life in a new home. Why? Because the working memory Conductor allows you to shift smoothly from thought to thought, to look at the world in a different way, and to think about old information in novel ways. Stay Motivated to Achieve Long-Term Goals Let’s say you’re finishing up your secondary education, and you aspire to an Oxbridge college. You may have high marks, but you still have to perform in your A-levels. If you study diligently, you can get the grades you need and stand a good chance of gaining entry to an elite institution. Working memory helps you keep your goal in mind and gives you the motivation you need to put your nose to the grindstone even when your friends are heading out to a party and invite you to join them. Working memory helps you say no. Stay Positive in the Midst of a Dire Situation Your Conductor is wired to organize emotions into those that are relevant and those that are not. The Conductor interprets signals from the amygdala, the primitive emotional heart of the brain that generates feelings of fear and anxiety, and then modulates those emotions to help us concentrate on positive thoughts. Later, we’ll show you how this played out when Mario Sepulveda, one of the thirty men rescued from a collapsed Chilean coal mine in 2010, used humor to keep the group from devolving into chaos. Even during the gloomiest days underground, Mario was able to stay upbeat by focusing on the future. Follow Your Moral Compass Working memory helps you do the right thing in business, in social interactions, and even in your romantic relationships. It can help you stay faithful while others stray. Research shows that a good working memory gives you romantic self-control. People with a robust working memory manage to keep their relationship goals in mind and act to protect their relationship when something threatens it—like when an attractive coworker comes on to you during a business trip. Conversely, people with poor working memory are more vulnerable to giving in if an opportunity to stray presents itself. Be a Better Athlete There are times when a powerful working memory can be your best teammate. Let’s say you’re a tennis player. When the tennis ball comes bouncing to your side of the net, what shot do you make? Forehand cross-court, backhand down the line, lob, drop shot? Working memory helps you sift through the options and choose the best one, all while keeping in mind your opponent’s position on the court. The more quickly your working memory can process all this information, the more likely you are to execute the shot well. The Most Important Learning Tool: The New IQ Our society has relied on IQ as the go-to measure of intellectual capability for nearly a century. The common belief is that the higher your IQ, the better your advantage in whatever you do. But a high IQ doesn’t necessarily mean you will get what you want in life. On the other hand, how do some people with below-average IQ scores rise to the top to become business bigwigs, bestselling authors, or innovative inventors? What if we told you that IQ isn’t the best measure of intelligence or the best predictor of lifetime success, especially not in the twenty-first century? The modern IQ test has its roots in the early twentieth century. In 1917, as World War I raged on, the U.S. Army enlisted Richard Yerkes, the distinguished president of the American Psychological Association, to create a test to measure the intelligence of nearly 3 million army recruits. The army wanted to determine which men should be officers and which should be relegated to the lower ranks. Yerkes designed a test that measured the recruits’ knowledge of facts and vocabulary, also known as crystallized knowledge. But during wartime when nothing goes according to plan and you have to adapt to enemy tactics or lose, knowing concrete facts—say, that Rutherford B. Hayes was elected president in 1876 or that Bismarck is the capital of North Dakota—isn’t really helpful. Many of the men tagged for high-ranking positions failed miserably, while some men who languished in the lower ranks proved to have excellent military minds. The army quickly realized that Yerkes’s test was identifying the wrong men for the job and abandoned it after six months. But the rest of society has continued to measure intelligence based on the amount of crystallized knowledge you have, and the modern IQ test doesn’t look all that different from Yerkes’s test. That’s a big problem. Thanks to Google and similar search engines, the world has undergone profound transformation in how we seek out, weed out, and absorb information. We live in the Google age. In cognitive terms, Google is great. It has considerably reduced the amount of intellectual resources that we previously had to dedicate to rooting out facts before we could do something with them. Because of Google, we no longer need to rely so much on crystallized knowledge—the memorization of facts, dates, or names—associated with IQ and the traditional concept of intelligence. With nothing more than a few clicks, we can pull up just about any information we need. But the key to intelligence today is being able to put those facts together, prioritize the information, and do something constructive with it. And there is one skill that gives you the advantage of managing all this information: working memory. IQ is what you know. Working memory is what you can do with what you know. In one of her earliest research projects, Tracy compared students’ grades with their IQ and working memory scores. She found that working memory could predict what grade they would get with far greater accuracy than IQ. In fact, if Tracy knew a child’s working memory, she could determine his or her grades with 95 percent accuracy. In Chapter 5 (#u741637d5-e6ef-5a49-a244-465f31d8fd02) we will go into much greater detail about this study and other research showing that working memory gives you more of an advantage in the classroom than IQ. Here are just a few of the many fascinating and sometimes surprising findings we will explore in that chapter: A good working memory is the best advantage in school and is causally related to grades. Kids with good IQ scores don’t necessarily have a good working memory. An average or even a high IQ doesn’t necessarily give the student the tools for success in the classroom and beyond. IQ is linked to how rich or poor you are, but working memory isn’t, which makes it a great equalizer. The research on working memory also shows that the strength of a person’s working memory influences far more than grades. An abundance of new evidence, which we present in this book, shows that the strength of your working memory plays a pivotal role in how successful you will be in many areas of your life, including whether you’ll have the fortitude to work toward your long-term goals, whether you view the glass as half-full or half-empty, and even whether you’ll be able to lay off the junk food when dieting. How Working Memory Is Undermined Unfortunately, many things in our fast-paced 24/7 society are working against us to weaken our working memory. And when working memory isn’t operating at full speed, it puts us at a big disadvantage. Information Overload If your working memory isn’t up to snuff, you could drown in the overwhelming flood of data. Todd learned about the impact of information overload the hard way. As a serial entrepreneur, the thirty-five-year-old father of three was no stranger to the frenetic pace of a Silicon Valley high-tech start-up company. He spent every day sitting in front of four computer screens that beeped and pinged and flashed email alerts, instant messages, websites, and Twitter feeds. His clients constantly called his home office, his kids demanded attention, and he was inseparable from his iPhone as he toggled between his home and office life. For more than a year, Todd had been looking for a buyer for his company. But when a large company based on the East Coast emailed Todd saying that they were interested in acquiring his firm, the email got lost in the chaos of his life and he didn’t discover it in his email inbox for over a week. If he hadn’t finally stumbled across it when scanning back through his correspondence one evening at home, he might have lost what turned into a $2-million-dollar sale. The Lure of Instant Gratification In our I want it now society, we want immediate satisfaction. Our quest for the fleeting thrill we get from an impulsive purchase or from eating an entire bag of chips when we’re on a diet, relegates working memory to the sidelines of the decision-making process. This is why we so often opt for smaller, more immediate rewards rather than waiting for bigger and better things, like a fat bank account, or a slim waistline. Time Constraints Being squeezed for time burdens working memory and makes you more likely to give in to impulse—whether you’re confronted with a limited-time-offer purchase, for example, or trying to select the correct answers while taking a timed test, or even when faced with an ultimatum from a significant other to get engaged now or break up. In Chapter 2 (#ue80854d3-0353-55a4-9c25-c5526ae14684), we look at how this plays out on eBay, where the ticking clock can overwhelm your working memory, making it more likely you will give into impulse and pay more than you should. Stress When the pressure is on, it can overload your working memory and sabotage your performance at work, at school, or even on the pitch. Think of the angst that every team feels in a penalty shoot-out against Germany. Their reputation for flawless penalties transforms some of the world’s best players into tripping toddlers. Stuart Pearce, Chris Waddle, Gareth Southgate—all these England players stepped up to take penalties in shoot-outs against Germany—and stress caused them to miss. Goodbye, glory. Retirement Sorry to burst your bubble, but if you’ve been dreaming about the day you can say good-bye to the 9-to-5 grind and hello to retirement, we have to inform you that retirement makes you dumb. Retirement marks not just a reduction of work, but also a reduction in thinking and, consequently, a reduction in your working memory strength. Pain If you’ve ever slammed your hand in the car door or spilled boiling water on your lap, you know that it’s tough to think clearly when you’re in pain. Scientists have discovered that pain, including chronic aches like a sore back or knee, may disrupt working memory. Romance What does romance have to do with working memory? In a 2012 study, Jeffrey Cooper and colleagues at Trinity College Dublin discovered that the PFC plays a big role in the first flush of attraction. They scanned the brains of nineteen- to thirty-one-year-olds on the prowl and showed them photos of potential mates. Some photos caused a burst of activity in parts of their PFC. Participants then went to a speed-dating event, and the researchers discovered that the stronger the activation in the PFC, the more likely the participants were to pursue a second date. If you find your working memory working overtime when you first meet someone, there is a good chance that you’ll take a chance and ask them out. Some exciting new research by Johan Karremans at Rodboud University in the Netherlands offers insight into why men often become tongue-tied when meeting a woman whom they find attractive. He found that men’s scores on a working memory test were lower after they’d had a brief conversation with a beautiful woman. And intriguingly, he did not find this “attraction effect” in women after they’d had a conversation with a handsome man. His interpretation of his results is that because traditional gender roles require men to take the initiative in engaging in conversation with a potential mate, their working memories are more taxed by the process. Video Games, Smoking, and Overeating Whatever your guilty pleasure may be, it can take your working memory offline. A healthy working memory inhibits self-destructive habits, but engaging too often in highly addictive behaviors causes changes in the brain. Basically certain brain regions gang up and recruit your working memory into fulfilling the addictive desire, rather than stopping it. How Working Memory Can Be Improved As little as five years ago, people thought that working memory was fixed—that you were stuck with what you were born with. But research is showing otherwise. Think of working memory as like a rubber band. Some rubber bands are big, and some are small, but they can all be stretched. In the same way, we’re all born with a certain level of working memory. But regardless of our genetic predisposition for a strong or not-so-strong working memory, nearly every one of us can stretch it to get a bigger advantage in life. The lessons we’ve learned from our work with students to train their working memory with the Jungle Memory software Ross developed have confirmed that significant improvements are possible. Take the case of a young girl named Jasmine. She was often told that she needed to “try harder,” but despite doing her best, she couldn’t keep up at school or follow her mom’s instructions at home. After being diagnosed with a working memory deficit, Jasmine used the Jungle Memory program for eight weeks and saw dramatic results. She improved her working memory by over 800 percent (an amazing result!) and started winning achievement awards at school. Tracy has also seen significant improvements in clinical trials when she tested the working memory of students with reading and math difficulties. After they had trained regularly for eight weeks with Jungle Memory, they showed fantastic improvements in working memory; even more exciting was that their grades also improved—generally a whole grade point, such as from a C to B or a B to an A. Another study showed that they maintained all of these improvements eight months later. Throughout this book, we introduce you to a host of simple working-memory-training exercises, so that you can get started on getting your working memory in shape as you read. And at the end of the book, we provide a quick hits training manual that you can use on the go to help keep your working memory sharp. In the chapters that follow, we first draw on more than a decade of research and practical experience to explore why working memory is so vital in our lives and the role it plays in our general work aptitude and in our general life happiness, as well as in learning, overcoming addiction, and achieving in sports. In part II, we show you how working memory changes during our lives from childhood to old age and introduce encouraging evidence about how we can keep our working memory in good shape during later life. We also present specific tools for strengthening working memory—from the most effective brain training programs, to the best foods to eat (some of them may surprise you), to small but crucial tweaks in your daily habits that can make a big difference for your working memory. The chapters in part III imagine a future in which the world is designed to give our working memory the best advantage and look at groundbreaking research on how it gave our ancestors an evolutionary advantage. Test Your Working Memory To help you get a basic understanding of the strength of your working memory, here are two quick tests. For a more detailed measure of your working memory power, take the full online test at http://testwm.com. Test 1 Below is a list of three-letter words. Don’t look at it! Ask a friend to quiz you using the list of words. In level 1 of this test, your friend is going to read aloud two words, like cat and bat. You have to try to remember the two words, reverse them, and repeat them backward. Tab. Tac. In level 2, you have to do the same with three words. In level 3, it’s four words. Most people are able to do level 1, but you need a strong working memory to complete levels 2 and 3 correctly. Test 2 Level 1 1. Look at the pyramid below. Remember the triangle where the letter appears. 2. Now look at this picture. Does it start with the same letter as the letter in the triangle? 3. Here is another pyramid. Remember the triangle where the letter appears. 4. Now look at this picture. Does it start with the same letter as the letter in the triangle? 5. Now draw arrows to the triangles where the letters appeared, in the correct order. Level 2 Follow the same directions as in Level 1. 1. Remember the triangle where the letter appears. 2. Does the picture start with the same letter as the letter in the triangle? 3. Remember the triangle where the letter appears. 4. Does the picture start with the same letter as the letter in the triangle? 5. Remember the triangle where the letter appears. 6. Does the picture start with the same letter as the letter in the triangle? 7. Now draw arrows to the triangles where the letters appeared, in the correct order. Level 3 Follow the same directions as in Level 1. 1. Remember the triangle where the letter appears. 2. Does the picture start with the same letter as the letter in the triangle? 3. Remember the triangle where the letter appears. 4. Does the picture start with the same letter as the letter in the triangle? 5. Remember the triangle where the letter appears. 6. Does the picture start with the same letter as the letter in the triangle? 7. Remember the triangle where the letter appears. 8. Does the picture start with the same letter as the letter in the triangle? 9. Now draw arrows to the triangles where the letters appeared, in the correct order. Scoring The number of letters you can remember in the correct order gives you an indication of the strength of your working memory. If you are like most adults, you were probably able to complete levels 1 and 2 of this test correctly. Data from thousands of people confirm that the average five-year-old can remember and process two things. Most adults are able to remember four or five items in the correct order. If you didn’t fare so well on these tests, don’t get frustrated. You can always make an improvement. If you aced these assessments, don’t get too smug. You need to continually challenge your working memory to keep it in tiptop shape. Doing brain training exercises, such as the ones in this book, can help optimize your working memory. 2 (#ulink_b1d9d48a-5a0d-5c3e-b281-73cbb3846323) Why Working Memory Is Crucial to Success (#ulink_b1d9d48a-5a0d-5c3e-b281-73cbb3846323) WE HAVE SPENT a lot of time studying what happens when our working memory Conductor fails to keep control—from kids struggling to keep up in the classroom to bad habits such as gambling and overeating and failing to meet deadlines at work. An overtaxed working memory may even be behind your feeling like a grump all the time, or an inability to control your wandering eye even though you’ve found “the one.” At the heart of why working memory is so important in endeavors from work to school, to sports, to dieting is a core set of skills that a strong working memory enables us to exercise. To dig deeper into how working memory operates and how it enhances our lives, in this chapter we focus on this essential skill set, starting with perhaps the most distinctive feature of human life: our will—that is, the ability to choose for ourselves, to act, to carry out plans, to take responsibility for what we do. Working Memory and Will Your will affords you the wherewithal to go after the things you want in life: choosing a university, selecting a subject, chasing after a romantic partner, and vigorously pursuing a career. Why is working memory central to our ability to exercise will? Because exercising will requires evaluating, planning, and executing plans; keeping long-term goals in mind; controlling impulses; and overcoming obstacles—all of which rely on working memory skills. We had an intense experience of the relationship between the working memory and will when we taught in El Salvador, a country known for danger. During our time there, grocery stores had guards armed with shotguns positioned by the milk and an area for you to check your guns and coats before you shopped. We quickly learned to deal with everyone in an exceedingly polite manner. On our very last day in the country, we were driving on a well-traveled road when a car swerved and cut us off. Ross, who was driving, saw that one of many men in the car had a shotgun. He zipped his lips. Because of her line of sight, Tracy, in the passenger seat, didn’t see the gun, and the red mist descended, and she used unmistakable, universal sign language to express her dissatisfaction. Fortunately, the men didn’t notice the gesture or didn’t care, and we continued on our way unharmed. The way our two minds reacted so differently to the same incident is a prime example of how the will works. Joaquin Fuster, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA, once described the process by saying that the will must take into account a barrage of three kinds of information: Internal information—hormonal levels, mood, emotions, information from organs External information—the constant stream of information transmitted by the senses System of Principles—information—language, memory, values, culture, civics, and laws we are bound to Our working memory Conductor takes all this information in, categorizes it, decides a course of action, and executes that plan. So let’s see how Fuster’s model may have played out in our driving mishap. After slamming on the brakes to avoid the accident, Ross’s Conductor rapidly processed the three kinds of information: Internal information: His amygdala was pretty pissed off and sent that information to his working memory. External information: Before he could hurl an insult, his working memory also brought to bear the sight of the gun and the number of men in the car. System of principles information: Cultural awareness that an expletive may provoke violence (as well as the painful awareness that he would be showing up to a gunfight with halting Spanish as a weapon). His working memory weighed all this information, decided that there was no advantage to responding, and, in an expression of will, took the action of zipping his lip. Now let’s look at what happened in Tracy’s mind. Her Conductor was also busy handling information: Internal information: Like Ross’s, Tracy’s amygdala fired off a message of anger to her PFC. External Information: Crucially, she didn’t have the same external information—she saw only the car cut us off. Unlike Ross, she did not see the gun nor did she count the number of men in the car. System of principles information: Including an unmerited confidence in Ross’s limited bilingualism to deal with any consequences. Also, the ethical sense that we had been wronged and deserved justice. After weighing all this information in a matter of nanoseconds, her will elected to unleash a dramatic reply demonstrating her anger. The exercise of will is not just a matter of being deliberative. It’s more complicated than that and involves a complex juggling act of assessing information, modulating emotions, and thinking strategically. It’s your Conductor that helps you sift through all the data to come up with a plan, and in some instances, the best course of action may be a more aggressive go-for-it approach. Let’s say you have come up with what you think is a promotion-worthy idea for a new marketing campaign, and you excitedly share it with your immediate supervisor, Kathy. The next day, you overhear Kathy telling the marketing director about your idea and taking credit for it. Do you say nothing or stand up for yourself? Keeping the peace ensures that you won’t irritate your supervisor, but it also means that you will probably be stuck in a cubicle for the foreseeable future. Telling the marketing director that it’s your idea may upset Kathy but it could be your ticket to a big office and a major payday. You decide it’s worth it, and it’s your working memory that allows you to think strategically to come up with a clever way to let the boss know it was your idea without making Kathy look bad. Delay of Gratification Those who are able to delay gratification have a great advantage in life. By going for the fast buck, the easy way out, we lose the rewards that come with practiced patience, and as we will see in this section, it is our working memory that helps us achieve long-term goals. As anyone who has worked hard to move up the career ladder knows, it’s the things you don’t do as much as the things you do that make it possible to ascend the ranks. It is the times you don’t go to happy hour with your friends so you can take night classes to advance in your career, don’t plop down in front of the TV on Sunday for a football marathon when you need to prep for Monday’s meeting, and don’t call in sick for a “mental health day” just because you had a little too much fun over the weekend. The ability to set aside current pleasure for a greater reward is critical for success. But human nature has long been known to undermine this ability. Behavioral economist and psychologist George Ainsle is famous for his theoretical work on decision making and impulse control. In 1975, Ainsle drew together research demonstrating how people are much more inclined to pursue immediate rewards that are lesser rather than wait for a bigger reward later on. In one study, when participants were offered the choice of an immediate reward of $11 or a delayed reward of $85, they tended to take the smaller amount. We now know that working memory plays a major role in this process, thanks to John Hinson and researchers from Washington State University. They found that when working memory is removed from the decision-making process, the average person opts for a smaller, immediate reward rather than waiting for an even better outcome. Hinson overloaded his participants’ working memory with a large amount of information. Then when given a choice between accepting a small reward of between $100 and $900 immediately or waiting for a larger reward of up to $2,000, their working memory was unable to calculate which reward would be better in the long run. As a result, they followed their impulse and grabbed the smaller, immediate reward. This study was echoed in research conducted by Bennedetto De Martino from University College London. He wanted to look at what was happening in the brain when people used their will to hold out for a larger reward. De Martino gave people a series of risk scenarios, but this time he scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). De Martino found that when people opted for the smaller but certain reward, they didn’t really mull over the decision. Their emotional center, the amygdala lit up, and they made the easy, if unconsidered, choice. But when people controlled their impulse and chose the larger and uncertain reward, their prefrontal cortex, which houses their working memory, lit up. Some people had a more automatic and stronger emotional response to these decisions: their amygdala showed greater activation. You may think that such people are more likely to always opt for the immediate choice, but when de Martino ran the numbers, he saw that the strength of their emotions didn’t determine how likely they were to choose the immediate reward. In fact, it was how hard their working memory was working that influenced their choice. If their PFC showed less activation, they followed their impulses. But the greater the activation, the more likely they were to make the better choice. Our Conductor’s ability to delay gratification is also backed up by a decades-long series of studies from psychologist Walter Mischel, starting with his famous marshmallow test in 1968 and continuing with his most recent findings published in 2011. In the 1960s in his lab at Stanford University, Mischel offered more than six hundred children between the ages of four and six a marshmallow. Then he told them that he was going to leave the room, and if they could wait until he returned, they would get a second marshmallow. If they could not wait, they could ring a little bell that he left on the table, and he would return and let them eat the one marshmallow. Some of the children immediately popped the marshmallow into their mouths while others resisted temptation and held out for the greater reward of two marshmallows. Although Mischel and his colleagues didn’t call the marshmallow test a working memory task, we now know that it had many of the same features of a working memory task, such as keeping a goal or greater reward in mind, ignoring a distraction, planning, and executing strategies to divert attention. Based on what we now know about working memory, we understand that a child can manage only a limited amount of information, and they can easily be overwhelmed by a very tempting option, such as a single delicious, pillowy marshmallow sitting in front of them. In order to overcome the urge to reach out and gobble up the marshmallow, they had to use their working memory Conductor to shift their gaze or, at the very least, their attention to something else. The kids used a variety of techniques to distract themselves from the fluffy treat: hiding under the table, covering their eyes with their hands, turning their chair the opposite way, or singing a song. Mischel has tracked these children over the years, investigating whether their ability to delay gratification gave them an advantage in life. For example, in a 1990 follow-up study, Mischel compared the children’s SAT scores with how they performed in the initial experiment and found that the longer a child had been able to wait for that second marshmallow, the higher his or her SAT score was. In a paper published in 2011, Mischel and his colleagues retested the group. Now that they were in their forties, would they still be defined by how they performed as children? They selected the adults who as children were high delayers—they were able to resist the temptation to eat the marshmallow for longer— and those who gave in pretty quickly. In one testing session, they showed both a series of faces with different expressions—happy, fearful, or neutral—and asked them to press the space bar on the computer every time they saw a happy face but ignore the fearful or neutral faces. The groups performed similarly. In another testing session, the participants now had to press the space bar every time they saw a fearful expression and not when they saw a smiling face. It is a natural human impulse to respond to a smiling face, so this would require suppressing that natural inclination. Those who as children were low delayers, also had trouble not responding to the happy faces as adults; while those who had been high delayers as children, were able to control their impulses. The next step was to find out what was happening in the brain, so they put the adults in a brain scanner while they were doing the same face task. When the high delayers had to resist the temptation to press the space bar in response to a happy face, the PFC was activated. But the low delayers were not using this area of the brain as much as the high delayers were. Instead, they were recruiting an area of the brain called the striatum, associated with automatized and unconsidered reactions. Although Mischel didn’t give specific details on the career successes of the participants, anecdotally it seems to be the case that the high delayers turned out to be more professionally accomplished. Carolyn, one of the high delayers, earned a Ph.D. at Princeton and is now a college psychology professor. Craig, a low delayer, moved to Los Angeles and has spent his career as a jack-of-all-trades. He is still looking for the solid ground on which to build his career. As Craig remarks, “Sure, I wish I had been a more patient person. Looking back, there are definitely moments when it would have helped me make better career choices and stuff.” We saw just how badly this lure of instant gratification can derail us in life with the recent financial crisis. The housing market lured home buyers into making unwise purchases in part by offering a highly appealing deal in the short term. Buyers’ working memories were short-circuited, and they purchased increasingly expensive houses without considering how they were going to afford the payments or what they would do if the houses decreased in value. They went for the quick-and-easy profit. The oversubscribed credit market, which contributed to the crash, was similarly designed to provide consumers with instant gratification. Want that new car but don’t have the cash? Don’t worry: go ahead and buy it at full price and make monthly payments for the next sixty months. Must have that Louis Vuitton bag but don’t have ?4,000 in your pocket? No problem; just charge it to the credit card with 18 percent annual interest rate. Need that HDTV now so you can watch the big game today? What’s a 10 percent monthly charge added to the cost? Salesmen put us at a disadvantage when they interfere with working memory, and we often walk away with impulsive purchases like the 4x4 Range Rover that we all know will never see an unpaved track. Have you ever paid more than you should have on eBay? We certainly have, and the reason is that online bidding overloads working memory. Let’s say you’re bidding on a home entertainment system that you could buy new at your local Argos for about ?500. You find a used one online for a ?49 minimum bid. Fantastic deal, you think. So you place your bid. Each time the price changes, your Conductor has to work with the new numbers to determine if it’s still a fantastic deal or, when you factor in shipping costs and the fact that there is no warranty, if it costs more than it is worth. At the same time, you have to use your Conductor to suppress the excitement coming from the amygdala, your brain’s emotional center that is egging you on to win! Finally, as the clock counts down, your working memory has less and less time to process all the changing variables. The result is that you end up paying ?300 for a possibly damaged entertainment system with no warranty. Car dealers use the same tactic. They put you into a pressure cooker situation with a changing set of numbers to calculate, play on your emotions—“If I speak to my boss, do I have your word that you are going to do a deal with me?”—and give you a limited-time offer. Then you end up driving away from the dealer behind the wheel of a new car wondering why you paid more than you wanted to for a car that isn’t even the color you wanted. Psychologist Itiel Dror conducted an experiment that shows just how limited-time offers make us take greater risks than we normally would. In his trial, people were asked to play a simplified version of blackjack, in which players were dealt cards one at a time. Cards were worth whatever the number of the card was (a 7 of hearts was worth 7 points), and the numbers were added up with each new card. The goal was to avoid going over 21 points in total. The closer you get to 21, there’s a much greater risk that you will go over with the next card, so after players get what they consider to be enough points, they usually hold, or stop taking cards. Participants were asked to play the game twice. In the first round, they were allowed to take their time when making a decision to take another card or to hold. In the second round, they were given no time for reflection and had to make automatic decisions. Dror found that when they were forced to make a quick decision, they made bad choices. So if they had accumulated a large number of points, say 18, they were more likely to take another card even though it was highly likely they would go over 21. If they had no time pressure, they were far more conservative when they reached a higher number. The irony in this allure of immediate satisfaction is that psychologists have found that the amount of pleasure you derive from that impulsive purchase dissipates considerably with the pain of making the payments. In order to achieve that fleeting feeling of excitement again, you need to plunk down your credit card for another new bag or gizmo. Eventually you may be perpetually chasing the thrill of the new purchase while placing yourself deeper and deeper in debt. If people really thought through a purchasing strategy of “owe more, enjoy it less,” they would be far less likely to buy anything on credit ever again. The ability to delay gratification and practice strategic allocation of our attention is vital in many areas of life. When you have a big test or a big project due the next day, your working memory keeps that squarely in mind so you can say no to the kegger at the fraternity or the happy hour get-together with coworkers. Your working memory keeps you from gobbling up the cheesy lasagna on your fianc?’s dinner plate when you are trying to get into beach body shape for your island honeymoon that’s three weeks away. The good news, again, is that you aren’t stuck with the working memory you have now: you can strengthen it to shore up your ability to delay gratification and get the bigger rewards in life that you really want. Focus and Multitasking The ability to focus is another advantage that working memory gives us. Focus is crucial to learning and makes a big difference in our performance in school and beyond. In order to focus, your Conductor has to keep the goal in mind while making sure no other distracting thoughts overwhelm you. This is, of course, increasingly challenging in the world of nonstop email, Twitter feeds, and multiple windows open on our computers. The fact that the strength of one’s working memory makes a great deal of difference in this skill was demonstrated powerfully in a study that Michael Kane and colleagues at the University of North Carolina conducted in 2007, which measured the impact of working memory on people’s ability to stay on task in the midst of demanding activities. They gave working memory tests to more than one hundred young adults and asked them to keep a week-long record detailing how often they experienced distracting thoughts or mind wandering. They found that the people with low working memory scores were often distracted, especially as the tasks got harder. In contrast, those with high working memory scores maintained their attention better. Distraction isn’t the only impediment to focus. We are all increasingly expected to multitask, and studies have shown that this demand to multitask taxes working memory and easily overwhelms it. Let’s take a look at what multitasking might look like in the brain. Imagine that it is seven o’clock on a Wednesday night, and you are helping your daughter, Gemma, with her long-division homework. The last time you did long division was twenty-five years ago, so it’s not an easy chore, and you are firing signals between your intraparietal sulcus and PFC to stay on top of things. All of a sudden, you hear your phone make the email “ding!” and you break your attention from long division. You have a big deal in your sights at work, and they need your help. You’ve got to respond with some critical information ASAP. You set aside the long division, and fire off a quick response. Now, back to the long division. Psychologists call this skill task switching, and it is closely connected to your working memory abilities, as a colleague at the University of Geneva, Pierre Barrouillet, discovered in 2008. Barrouillet wanted to find out how switching from one task to another affects working memory. He gave the participants number tasks on a computer screen. Numbers were colored red and blue according to the task the person had to do. In the red task, participants had to decide whether numbers were larger or smaller than five. In the blue task, participants had to judge whether numbers were odd or even. The participants were given a chance to try it out and become used to the rules of both tasks. Barrouillet could now test whether switching between the red task and the blue task would jeopardize performance. When the participants had to do only the red task, they were fine. But when they had to quickly switch between the red and blue tasks, their working memory was overwhelmed. It took them much longer to complete it, and they also made more errors. One of the hardest realities of life these days is that there are certain times when you simply can’t shift your attention from one task fully to the other but must do both at once. For example, you may find yourself having to answer an email from work while sitting in a meeting with your child’s teacher, or take a call from school while navigating the highway on-ramp on your way to work. Can working memory allow us to do both, and will we be able to perform both tasks just as well as if we were focusing our attention on only one task? It depends. In 2010, Jason Watson and David Strayer at the University of Utah tested the ability of two hundred people to handle a multitude of tasks. The participants had to drive in a simulator while using a hands-free phone. To make the task even more challenging, they had to listen to an audio of a series of words interspersed with math problems. This was a working memory task that required considerable mental agility: they had to use their working memory to retrieve mathematical information from their long-term library to solve a problem. At the same time, they had to keep track of a string of words in the correct order. On top of all this, they had to negotiate traffic in the simulator. Out of the two hundred adults, the majority of them did worse in the driving simulator when they had to use their working memory at the same time. They took longer to brake than they should, and they tailgated a pace car. If you ever had to think through a work problem while driving or even decode your Aunt Mabel’s cryptic and hastily scribbled directions in the days before GPS, you know your driving can suffer. The results of this experiment were clear: people perform worse when they have to do more than one task at the same time. Watson and Strayer also found that while most people are at least able to keep two possible tasks in their mind, when that number grows and they are forced to handle more than two tasks, their working memory Conductor drops the baton. Scientists have known since the 1980s that performing two tasks at the same time undermines performance in both. But one additional discovery Watson and Strayer made was quite surprising: the rule that performing two tasks at once undermines our ability to do each well doesn’t apply to all of us. Participants who had top working memory scores were able to do both the driving and the working memory task at the same time without any decline in the performance of either. For these “Super Taskers,” as Watson and Strayer call them, their working memory was so good that it took everything in stride. If we improve our working memory, we can become more like the supertaskers. Managing Information Another major stress on our working memory is information overload: too much information can overwhelm our working memory. One interesting study that shows this effect was conducted by researchers at Washington State University, who wanted to look at how information overload can affect financial decisions. They gave participants a gambling task. They were presented with four decks of cards; some cards won them money, and some lost them money. Remembering what they’d won and comparing it with the cards they had turned over, the best players were able to determine quickly which decks were able to win them the most money and which decks were to be avoided because of losing cards. But when players were also given random sequences of numbers to remember, it took them longer to distinguish between the winning and losing decks, and they ended up losing more money. This shows that too much information can make you a bad investor. This is all the more true on Wall Street. If you’ve ever seen the bank of flashing screens at a broker’s desk, you have a sense of the information overload they are up against. When deciding whether to invest in a company, for example, they may take into account the people at the helm; the current and potential size of its market; net profits; and its past, present, and future stock value, among other pieces of information. Weighing all of these factors can take up so much of your working memory that it becomes overwhelmed. Think of having piles and piles of papers, sticky notes, and spreadsheets strewn about your desk, and you get a picture of what’s going on inside the brain. When information overloads working memory this way, it can make brokers—and the rest of us—scrap all the strategizing and analyses and go for emotional, or gut, decisions. This same breakdown in our analysis and decision making can happen to any of us when we’re overwhelmed by a tsunami of information at work. It can lead us to make emotional decisions at times when strategic thinking matters most, such as when choosing a new vendor. For example, if you interview all twenty-three candidates who expressed interest in the project rather than narrowing down the candidate pool to five or fewer, your Conductor may lose track of all the data about their past work experience and qualifications so you end up tossing all that valuable information out the window and going with your gut. You choose the guy who’s an Arsenal fan because you’re a huge Arsenal fan too. That’s not the smartest move. Children are just as likely to suffer this same type of working memory overload when they are overwhelmed with information at school. When teachers introduce too much material at once, the Conductor loses control. This can cause even the brightest students to stop reasoning and start guessing on tests. Too much information can even lead to what we call catastrophic loss of working memory. Our friend Sam was recently made redundant from his job because his company downsized. He had a six-month parachute to regroup and seek out new opportunities, but every time he sat down in front of his computer, he got distracted and overwhelmed. He would read emails from friends suggesting that he use his parachute to go travel in South America for three months. Other friends called recommending jobs, and the websites he surfed showed hundreds of possible career opportunities and directions he could take. He became paralyzed by the choices. In terms of working memory, too many choices equals too much information. Entertaining the myriad possibilities—traveling, becoming a firefighter, going back to school, writing the Great American Novel—caused Sam’s working memory to crash, much like a computer does when too many programs are running at the same time. He became so frustrated that he gave up his search and started watching endless reruns of CSI. He suffered a bout of depression, related to his working memory overload. We explore the important link between working memory and mood disorders and general life happiness more in the next chapter. It’s important to know that being faced with seemingly limitless choices, or simply too much information, doesn’t mean your working memory Conductor is doomed to fail. It’s the way you deal with the steady stream of choices and data that determines whether you’ll be inundated, like Sam, or able to quickly zero in on the best options and most important information for you. People who escape the crushing weight of too many choices don’t allow themselves to entertain every single possibility or attend to every bit of information. They winnow down the options and sources to a more manageable number. We offer some tips about the best methods for doing this in our training manual at the end of the book. Time Management Another skill crucial for productivity is time management. These days we all have to learn the art of doing more in less time. But the problem, as we all know, is that even as new technologies help us to work faster—responding to email, reviewing important sales data or new documents, all before we walk through our office door in the morning—they don’t always help us work smarter. One downside of the new technologies is that they have given us many new ways to spend our time; we linger online, checking multiple news sources, travel deals, or sale items on our favorite websites. Instead of being productive, we end up wasting more time. Working memory plays a vital role in helping us keep on top of the time we’re spending and complete the tasks at hand. Cognitive time management is a term Katya Rubia and Anna Smith at King’s College London used to describe how well we can estimate the amount of time we spend on a task, as well as manage the time we allocate to an activity. Their review of brain-imaging studies on cognitive time management revealed that the PFC is highly activated during tasks that involve timing. The theory is that working memory keeps track of passing time and modulates decisions about when to take action. Managing Stress One of the pervasive characteristics of life these days is stress, and unfortunately stress considerably undermines our working memory, as Mauricio Delgado of Rutgers University found. To test this in a study, Delgado created stress by submerging participants’ hands in a bath of cold water. Though this may seem a procedure unlikely related to stress, it is a psychologically recognized method for inducing stress without harming participants. Delgado found that the stress undermined the participants’ working memory to such a degree that when they were asked to determine the outcome of a series of financial investments, they tended to just give up thinking things through and use their emotions to give an answer. The negative effect that stress has on working memory was also shown revealed in a study conducted by Amy Arnsten and colleagues at Yale University. They worked with rats to simulate stress by increasing their levels of protein kinase C (PKC). High levels of PKC are connected to increased stress: the more PKC there is in its system, the more stressed the rat. When the researchers raised the levels of PKC in the rats, their working memory literally shut down. As a result, they had impaired judgment, high levels of distraction, and displayed impulsive behavior. High levels of stress definitely have a negative impact on working memory. But what’s really interesting is that having a stronger working memory can also help inoculate you against stress. In 2006, Rachel Yehuda of Mount Sinai School of Medicine and her colleagues at Yale Medical School examined working-memory-type skills in a wide range of traumatic and stressful situations. They looked at combat veterans who had experienced posttraumatic stress disorder, those facing the loss of a family member, women in early stages of breast cancer, and those who had just survived a natural disaster. They found that skills associated with working memory played a big role in helping them to cope. Calculating Risks One final basic skill that contributes significantly to success in life and in which your working memory Conductor is integral is assessing risks and rewards in a variety of situations. Do you quit your dead-end corporate job to take a position with a start-up company that could either put you on the career fast track or leave you jobless if the business fails? Do you follow the family tradition and go to your parents’ local alma mater, or do you enroll at a small liberal arts college thousands of miles from home? Do you accept the first job offer you get out of college or wait to see if something better comes up? Risk assessment is also fundamental to the more menial aspects of our daily lives. Things as ordinary as driving regularly require a great deal of risk calculation. Should you speed up to make it through a yellow stoplight or slam on the brakes? Deciding requires your working memory to quickly assess the oncoming situation, the presence of any pedestrians in the crosswalk, and the possibility that a police officer might be lurking ahead. It’s our working memory that allows us to juggle all this information in a split second. Think of all the daily tasks you do that require a similar assessment of risks, and you will realize how important working memory is. So we’ve seen how important working memory is to the core life skills that allow us to achieve success, whether in school or work. In the next chapter, we introduce a fascinating set of findings that revealed that working memory is crucial to success in another fundamental aspect of our lives: our general happiness. 3 (#ulink_026e76af-7223-5339-8f18-86ec4eac8c19) The Joker in the Mines (#ulink_026e76af-7223-5339-8f18-86ec4eac8c19) How Working Memory Makes Us Happier (#ulink_026e76af-7223-5339-8f18-86ec4eac8c19) MARIO SEPULVEDA, one of the thirty men rescued from a collapsed Chilean coal mine in September 2010, became famous for making jokes. During the sixty-nine days he and his coworkers were trapped in oppressive heat and total darkness deep in the heart of a dangerous mine, the forty-year-old’s infectious sense of humor helped to keep the group from devolving into chaos. Even on the gloomiest days before the miners heard the sounds of drilling and a showering of rocks signaling that a rescue effort had begun, Mario found happiness by focusing on what he would do when he got out. He tried hard not to let the dusty air get him down and didn’t complain about sleeping on damp cardboard with no sense of whether it was day or night. Instead, he led efforts to find potential escape routes, made jokes to maintain his sanity and hold up group morale, and supported the younger miners who were often scared and hysterical. Whenever Mario got depressed, he kept his tears private so that the group would not lose their faith. After the tense rescue effort came to an end and the miners were lifted to safety, Mario gave the rescue workers rocks wrapped in tin foil as a gag gift for their hard work. “We knew that if society broke down we would all be doomed,” he told a reporter for the Daily Mail. “It was important to keep clean, to keep busy, to keep believing we would be rescued.” The international headlines dubbed him “Super Mario” because he was the one who kept the group from falling apart. They celebrated Mario’s natural charisma, leadership, and positive outlook. But we have a slightly different take on the matter: we expect that Mario mobilized a healthy working memory to stay focused on the positive. Although the understanding of the relationship between working memory and happiness is still developing, a growing body of evidence shows that working memory is involved in our ability to keep a positive outlook, even in stressful, threatening situations like the one Mario and his fellow coal miners faced. The Science of Happiness “Happiness depends on ourselves.” This insightful gem, attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, elegantly summarizes what philosophers have long known: happiness is the consequence of decisions that we make in our lives. We can choose to be happy even in the most desperate circumstances. When Viktor Frankl, a key figure in existential therapy, was imprisoned in a concentration camp during World War II, he found meaning and a reason to live by focusing on his love for his wife. Instead of dwelling on his imprisonment, he made a choice to be happy by focusing on future goals. In the past decade or so, psychologists and neurologists have been employing sophisticated experimental techniques in an effort to understand what philosophers have known for so long. Working memory is at the center of their investigations. Sara Levens and Ian Gotlib from Stanford University are two of the psychologists examining the role that working memory plays in happiness. In a 2010 study, they recruited a group of adults with depression and another group of adults without any history of the mood disorder. Both groups had to perform a working memory task that required them to evaluate the emotional expressions—happy, sad, or neutral—of a series of faces viewed on a computer screen. As each face appeared on the screen, the participants had to judge whether it had the same or a different emotional expression as a face they had seen previously. The groups performed this task twice. The first trial does not require working memory because the participants only had to determine if the facial expression matched the one they had seen immediately prior (1-back). In the 2-back task, which does engage working memory, they had to determine if the facial expression matched the one they had seen two faces earlier. Here are examples of these tasks: 1-Back Task Sad Happy Sad Sad Neutral 2-Back Task Sad Neutral Sad Happy Neutral Happy Happy The words that are repeated in the 1-back or 2-back task are in bold. Levens and Gotlib measured the speed and accuracy of the responses. There was no significant difference between the depressed and nondepressed groups on the 1-back task. The difference emerged when it came to remembering the emotional expressions on the 2-back task, the task that engages working memory. The depressed individuals were faster in matching sad faces, while the non-depressed adults were quicker in matching happy faces. The psychologists suggest that the way we use working memory to process emotions played a role in this difference. They conclude that depressed individuals were more likely to keep sad emotions in their working memory, while the non-depressed people keep happy emotions in their working memory. This suggests that your working memory Conductor can be a double-edged sword when it comes to happiness: you can use it to fixate on the bad, or the good. Paraphrasing Aristotle, it’s your choice. But as we will see, those with a stronger working memory tend to choose happiness. To take her research a step further, Levens teamed up with Elizabeth Phelps of New York University to investigate what happens in the brain when people use working memory to process emotional information. They asked participants to perform working memory tasks in which they had to recognize positive and negative emotions. Participants were first shown a string of negative emotional words—like murder and terror—on a computer screen. They were then shown a single word (known as the target word) and asked to determine whether it was in the list of negative words they had just seen. The experimenters did the same with positive words. These tasks required the participants to use working memory to keep in mind the lists and then compare the target word with the lists. At the same time, the scientists observed the brain activity of the participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans. The scans revealed that blood rushed to the PFC, and the researchers showed that working memory plays a role in judging positive and negative emotions. But distinguishing between positive and negative thoughts isn’t the same as feeling a negative or positive emotion. So does having a strong working memory actually help make us feel happier? Working Memory Fires Up the Feel-Good Brain Chemicals The human brain is coursing with chemicals that create happy feelings. Two of these feel-good chemicals are the neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin. Dopamine is a pleasure and motivation chemical that is released in the brain whenever you do something enjoyable. The quick hit of dopamine produces a short-term feeling of euphoria, which encourages you to repeat the behavior. Serotonin is known as the Zen neurotransmitter because it is associated with feelings of deep and subtle satisfaction and long-term happiness. Serotonin is so critical to happiness that the most commonly prescribed antidepressants work by increasing its level in the brain. Exciting research is showing some surprising links between working memory and the production of both dopamine and serotonin. One study from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, used positron emission tomography (PET) scans to investigate the relationship between working memory and dopamine. The first step in this trial was to test the participants’ working memory to identify individuals with high and low working memory. Then both the strong and weak working memory groups underwent PET scans to measure dopamine production in their brains. The researchers found that the brains of participants with good working memory made more dopamine, while those with poor working memory made less. In another study conducted at the Heinrich-Heine University in Germany by Ruediger Grandt and colleagues, PET scans were used to examine whether there is any link between working memory and serotonin. The study revealed that when participants performed a working memory task that involved remembering a sequence of faces, they experienced an increase of serotonin that participants completing a non–working memory task did not experience. What we find particularly exciting about this study is that it is the act of using working memory that was linked to the surge in serotonin. In other words, simply using your working memory may make you happier. If you are feeling grumpy, you may want to try to engage in activities that use your working memory, to see if that dopamine and serotonin boost can improve your mood. Working Memory and the Glass Half Empty At the other end of the spectrum, we wanted to investigate how working memory is related to unhappiness, in particular, depression and rumination. Rumination is the term psychologists use when people fixate on things, often negative. It is an unproductive style of thinking that is difficult to control or stop, and it tends to be linked with strong emotions like worry and fear. It is like your working memory Conductor is playing the same sad song over and over again. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, a psychologist at Yale University, has been investigating rumination for more than a decade, and her research indicates that people who ruminate are more likely to develop depression; moreover, they experience more severe symptoms of depression. We wondered what effect rumination might have on working memory and discovered that emerging evidence suggests a relationship. Robert Hester and Hugh Garavan of Dublin’s Trinity College artificially increased rumination on negative thoughts by showing adults lists of words with negative connotations like murder, anger, and fight. They found that rumination not only made people more depressed but also impaired their working memory. In a related 2008 study, psychologists Jutta Joorman and Ian Gotlib gave two groups of people a task that required them to update information continually in their working memory, as well as trying to inhibit words with negative connotations. One group of participants was suffering from depression and the other was not. They found that the depressed individuals had more difficulty in not mulling over negative words, which inhibited their working memory. We wanted to investigate these links ourselves, so we spent three months researching a group of more than one hundred twenty-somethings. We chose people in their twenties because these are the years in which people tend to move out of their parents’ home, make new friends, and explore new ideas, and though this transition into adulthood can be exciting, it can also be a stressful time and result in a sense of feeling overwhelmed and even depressed. Because this age group faces so many challenges to their happiness, they presented a good opportunity for us to explore how working memory helps us to manage our emotions and stay positive. The twenty-somethings in our study performed several cognitive tasks. First, they completed a working memory task from Tracy’s Alloway Working Memory Assessment (AWMA). We asked them questions such as, “Oranges live in water. True or false?” and then asked them to repeat the last word of the statement. Questions like this engage working memory because the brain is forced to hold the sentence in mind and decide if it’s a true statement while repeating the last word. We then divided the participants into those with strong and weak working memory. We also asked these young adults to complete questionnaires often used in hospitals and clinics to provide an objective measure of depression. This required participants to rate statements depending on how strongly they felt each applied to them during the past week. Some statements expressed negative feelings such as, “I was bothered by things that don’t usually bother me.” Others expressed positive feelings such as, “I felt hopeful about the future.” Based on their responses, we determined whether they were depressed. We also measured their tendency for rumination using a similar questionnaire. We had hypothesized that ruminators and depressed participants would have relatively poor working memory and that ruminators would be depressed. But when we analyzed the working memory scores, depression status, and propensity for rumination among the young adults, we made some very surprising findings: not all of the ruminators had low working memory scores, and not all ruminators were depressed. The ruminators who had good working memory were less likely to suffer depression compared to the ruminators who had poor working memory. Our interpretation is that though their working memory Conductor plays the same song, it is also strong enough to inhibit the negative emotions associated with depression. Working Memory and the Glass Half Full The results of our study on working memory, rumination, and depression were an exciting start because they revealed that people do use working memory to manage emotions, resolve problems, and avoid slipping into depression. Encouraged by these findings, we looked at the opposite end of the happiness scale to determine if a strong working memory makes people more likely to choose optimism. To explore this question, we joined forces with the British Science Festival, a hugely popular annual event celebrating science, engineering, and technology. With help in promoting our study and inviting festivalgoers to participate in it, we were able to conduct another large-scale study involving thousands of adults. The scale of the study helped us understand how working memory influences happiness and if a strong working memory will make you more likely to see the glass half full. For this study, participants completed a working memory test and filled out the Life Orientation Test, a clinical questionnaire that gauges levels of optimism and pessimism. We also asked participants to answer yes or no to the following questions: 1 In uncertain times, I usually expect the best. 2 I’m always optimistic about my future. 3 If something can go wrong for me, it will. I rarely count on good things happening to me. When we looked at their responses, we found a correlation between the strength of working memory and level of optimism. Those with stronger working memory were more likely to have a high level of optimism, while those with weaker working memory tended to be more pessimistic. These results suggest that people with high working memory tend to be more hopeful and confident about the future, while those with weak working memory tend to be more pessimistic. The research we have examined so far in this chapter suggests that a good working memory is associated with happiness and optimism. It’s not a direct causal relationship because happiness is complex, and many factors—both personal and cultural—play into personal happiness. So although a strong working memory can’t guarantee optimism, it can set your feet more firmly on the path to fulfillment. One of the huge benefits of optimism is a longer and more satisfying life. Becca Levy’s research at the University of Yale’s School of Public Health demonstrated that older adults who are optimistic about aging live an average of 7.5 years longer than their less optimistic counterparts. An optimistic outlook is also associated with a healthier life. For example, Hillary Tindale and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh found that optimism reduces the risk of coronary heart disease, which can lead to death. In their study of almost one hundred thousand women aged fifty to seventy-nine, they compared the 25 percent most optimistic with the 25 percent most pessimistic and found that the optimistic women had less risk of cardiovascular problems, as well as reduced risk for diabetes and hypertension. A study with men followed over a ten-year period found similar results: those who were optimistic were less likely to develop coronary heart disease as they aged compared to those who were pessimistic. Less Is More At the end of this chapter, we share some simple exercises to help you strengthen your working memory, but in the meantime let’s take a quick look at a few coping strategies to improve both working memory and happiness. In Chapter 2 (#ue80854d3-0353-55a4-9c25-c5526ae14684), we introduced you to our friend Sam who struggled to wade through all the possibilities after losing his job. Too many choices result in psychological stress and unhappiness. A 2010 study by Hazel Markus and Barry Schwartz published in the Journal of American Consumer Research backed this up, finding that although American culture venerates choice and freedom, people often become paralyzed by unlimited choice and are less happy with their decisions as a result. As you saw in Chapter 2 (#ue80854d3-0353-55a4-9c25-c5526ae14684), an excess of choice can overload your working memory and lead to lots of negative consequences, including an increase in stress and anxiety, an inability to make a decision, and even ruminating over whether you’ve made the right choice. So one way to improve your happiness is to minimize the number of choices you have to make. At the office, for example, you might want to dedicate specific chunks of time to specific tasks and open only one program on your computer screen rather than toggling between multiple windows and switching back and forth between options. At home, many of us feel that rushing our children off to five activities a day will improve their lives and make them happier. The reality is that offering your children too many choices of extracurricular activities may overwhelm them and reduce how well they perform in the activities they do pursue. By choosing a few activities and focusing on some relaxing downtime in which the family reconnects, there will be less working memory overload, and everyone will feel less stressed and happier. Limiting your consumer choices will help too. At the supermarket, interesting packaging or new products compete for our attention. Sometimes it’s hard to decide which of the ten different brands of the same product to buy. In order to limit the number of choices and not get overwhelmed, make a list of exactly what you need before you go to the market, and stick to it. Our friend Sam who fell into depression because he couldn’t decide what next job to pursue, found that narrowing his choices helped immensely. After a few weeks of his malaise, Sam’s wife encouraged him to seek the advice of a career coach, who helped him focus on one or two more immediate tasks and goals. His working memory was then able to better digest the information he had to consider, his stress lifted, and he became happier. He was able to make a list of potential jobs and started sending out his newly updated CV. Two weeks later, he landed an interview. Confronting Fears and Challenges One afternoon Ann, a corporate lawyer who had recently made partner, discovered a large bump in her lower back. She immediately started worrying that it was a cancerous tumor, but since she was so overwhelmed with her new job responsibilities, she avoided going to the doctor and tried to put the situation out of her mind. But the more she tried to suppress the thought, the more she kept going over catastrophic possibilities in her mind. Within a few weeks, she was very depressed. She had trouble focusing on work, got distracted in meetings, made faulty judgments on cases, and started to forget to return phone calls to her clients. In short, her working memory was impaired. Some fascinating research suggests that failing to address our problems undermines our working memory. One such study conducted by scientists at Harvard, Cornell, and the University of Texas researched the fight-or-flight mechanism in mice and found that mice who ran away from a variety of challenging situations (such as interacting with bigger, more aggressive mice) suffered weight loss, lower sex drive, and insomnia, and they had a change in levels of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). Previous research has shown that low levels of BDNF are associated with both a compromised working memory and depression, but the exact nature of this complex relationship has yet to be determined. The mice who interacted with the larger mice had regular sleep, a healthy sex life, normal eating, and no change in their BDNF levels. The authors suggest that the discovery has an important implication: dealing with your problems enhances resiliency. They draw on Rachel Yehuda’s research on working memory and stress, which we discussed in Chapter 2 (#ue80854d3-0353-55a4-9c25-c5526ae14684), to highlight how resiliency is evident after exposure to stressful situations and resilient people show optimism in the face of adversity. So let’s return for a moment to Ann, who was busy at work and put off dealing with her problem. As a result, her working memory—and her work—was adversely affected by the stress. When Ann’s best friend pleaded with her to get over her fear of going to the doctor and get the bump checked out, she finally decided to listen to her. The doctor took a biopsy, and it turned out that the bump was not malignant. The bottom line is if you avoid dealing with your problems, it can diminish your working memory and make you more susceptible to depression. This can have a knock-on effect, because a poor working memory also undermines your ability to deal appropriately with the fallout that comes from avoiding problems in the first place. By dealing with your problems head on, you at least have the benefit of a fully functioning working memory so you can adapt to whatever comes your way. Be Still and Be Happy Meditation has long been linked to a sense of calm happiness. In a 2007 trial, Richard Davidson and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison used functional MRI brain imaging to see what changes in the brain occur during meditation. The team enlisted expert meditators, many of whom had over 37,000 hours of meditation experience, as well as a group of novice meditators. As the participants meditated in the brain scanner, they were barraged with distracting sounds, such as restaurant noise, a baby cooing, or a woman screaming. The researchers found that compared to the novices, those with the most meditation experience were better able to filter out the distractions. The brain scans also showed greater activation of the PFC—the home of working memory—in the most experienced group. The PFC was recruited because the brain scans were conducted during concentration meditation, a form of meditation that involves focusing attention on a small visual image or on the breath, a technique that requires working memory. Amishi Jha and her colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania took this discovery a step further and found a more direct relationship among meditation, a strong working memory, and feelings of happiness. She looked at U.S. Marines who were feeling stressed before they were deployed for duty. One group meditated for thirty minutes every day for eight weeks and the other group for twenty minutes a week for eight weeks. After that period, the participants were asked to rate their positive and negative moods. The group that practiced for thirty minutes a day had higher working memory scores at the end of the eight weeks and reported more positive moods than the group that meditated less. We would speculate that the improvement in working memory enabled the Marines to more successfully filter out negative, stressful thoughts and instead focus on positive thoughts, thus improving their moods. At the beginning of this chapter we met “Super Mario,” a man whose positive outlook allowed him to triumph over incredible adversity, and asked whether a strong working memory might have contributed to his happiness. Having examined the evidence, we think the chances are good. A strong working memory Conductor would have helped Mario ignore negative emotions and focus on the positive, even though there was every reason to believe that the miners might not be rescued. Also, because he was keeping himself busy—telling jokes, planning his children’s future, looking for escape routes, and helping devise innovative ways to accomplish everyday chores while underground—which engaged his working memory, rather than brooding on possible doomsday scenarios—his dopamine and serotonin levels likely remained relatively high, preserving a feeling of well-being. If you are frustrated because your coworkers are bombarding you with emails and IM jokes, strengthening your working memory Conductor can help you eliminate these extraneous distractions and focus on getting your project in on time. If you’re feeling down because your spouse is complaining that the kids are arguing, the house is messy, and friends are arriving for dinner in fifteen minutes, building your working memory can help you focus on the fun to be had at the dinner party once you get your house in order and put the kids to bed. Working Memory Exercises Your working memory Conductor helps you to control your emotions, which is a big step toward experiencing more happiness. The following exercises will set you on the path to strengthen your working memory and gain better control over your moods and outlook. 1. Learn How to Manage Positive and Negative Emotions An important step to happiness is being able to identify what makes you happy and what makes you sad. We use our working memory to focus on familiar emotional information. This exercise will help train your working memory to evaluate emotional words, so that you can learn to focus the positive, rather than the negative. 1 Below is a list of words. Don’t look at it! 2 Ask a friend to read the list of words aloud. 3 Listen for repeating words. When you hear a repeated word that was read out three words before, do this:Snap your fingersTell your friend whether the word is emotionally positive, negative, or neutral. The answers are in bold on the list. Word List leaf unfortunate ecstatic sunny syrup ecstatic thankful syrup plank downer afraid friendly downer thankful 2. Have a Few Cups In 2012, Lars Kuchinke and colleagues from Ruhr University, Germany, discovered that drinking 200 mg of caffeine, or about two to three cups of coffee or four cups of tea, improves how fast and how accurately you can recognize positive words, but not neutral or negative ones. While this study didn’t examine if coffee drinkers are less likely to be depressed, one can point out that if coffee makes it easier to recognize the positive, it’s a good thing. 3. Filter Out the Negative When we ruminate, we can focus on negative experiences and emotions. This exercise trains your working memory to filter out negative feelings and focus on the positive ones. Level 1: Instructions 1 Draw a line to connect the positive words and ignore the other ones. 2 Turn the page over and on a separate sheet of paper list all the positive words you’ve just connected. Level 2: Instructions 1 Draw a line to connect the positive words and ignore the other ones. 2 Turn the page over and on a separate sheet of paper list all the positive words you just connected. 4. Prioritize Your Choices This exercise helps you to relieve the stress you feel when you are overwhelmed with too many choices by helping you to prioritize what’s most important. 1. Make a list of everything you do in an average day that places demands on your working memory—for example, checking Facebook, checking email on your phone, making breakfast. Your list may have thirty or more items on it. 2. Choose the tasks on the list that are the least important, and don’t do them for a week. You might put your iPad in a closet, limit your time on the Web when you’re working on your computer, or turn off your Twitter feed. 3. At the end of the week ask yourself the following questions: Do I feel less stressed? Do I feel more productive? Was I able to focus more effectively on a task that I accomplished? 4. If you answered yes to all of these, seriously consider restricting the tasks in order to experience less stress. You may want to try and take out more tasks. 4 (#ulink_36483a45-05a1-52d5-b347-2b92b59c0470) Failures, Bad Habits, and Missteps (#ulink_36483a45-05a1-52d5-b347-2b92b59c0470) WHEN YOU SEE wealthy athletes blow through millions of dollars and end up bankrupt, celebrities who seem to have it all throw everything away on a drug habit, or obese individuals continue to overeat in spite of having heart disease and diabetes, it’s natural to wonder why they can’t regulate their behavior. After years of research, we have found that out-of-control behavior is closely linked to working memory problems. In this chapter, we show you what happens when the working memory Conductor loses control. When Good Fortune Goes Bad In this down economy, who hasn’t fantasized about winning the lottery? We certainly have. But should we beware of what we wish for? As you’ve probably heard, many people who win the lottery report later that they are no happier, and many ultimately find the large sums of money a burden rather than a blessing. This seems terribly ironic, but we think it may be related to interference with working memory and in a way that illuminates the role of working memory in impulsive behavior. Take the case of Andrew Jackson “Jack” Whittaker whose $1 lottery ticket purchased at a gas station turned him into the biggest single U.S. lottery winner at the time: $314 million, which translated to a onetime payout of $113 million after taxes. If any lottery hopeful could handle a big win, you would think it would be Whittaker. He was already successful when he won. He had a net worth in the millions and was the president of a West Virginia–based contracting firm with more than one hundred employees. In the flush of excitement, Whittaker pledged a portion of his winning to various organizations and set up a nonprofit organization to support low-income families. But it didn’t take long before careful planning gave way to unbridled extravagance. The man who had made his millions with hard work and self-control was now thrust into a world in which he had so much money that he seems to have lost sight of its value and of his control in spending it. In the first year, he had already spent $45 million. His personal plan of spending time with his wife of over forty years and adoring granddaughter never came to fruition. Instead, the Washington Post quoted him as saying, “If they want quality time with me, they have to get up earlier or go to bed a lot later.” Between the trips to the racetrack and slot machines and buying property for development, it was no wonder he had less, not more, family time. And of course, Whittaker lived up to the stereotype of lottery winners by buying numerous cars and houses for himself, family members, and acquaintances. Five years after his win, he claimed that thieves had stolen a lot of money from him and that he was broke. He also had been charged with assault and drunk driving. Although Whittaker’s tale is not unique when it comes to big-ticket lottery winners, it is uncommon that such a tale begins with someone who was already wealthy. The reason this is relevant here is that Whittaker’s case provokes the question: Why wasn’t someone with experience in managing large amounts of money better prepared to manage his winnings better than most other winners? What turned him into such an impulsive spender? Wilhelm Hofmann, from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business’s Center for Decision Research, offers clues to the answer. He has spent several years researching decision making, impulsivity, and working memory. In a 2009 paper, he theorized a model of two significant influences in decision making—an impulsive system and a reflective system: Impulsive system: This system is automatic, unconsidered, and hedonistic, and it encourages us to do whatever feels good. Reflective system: This system is rational and involves strategic planning to achieve goals, deliberate judgment, and exercise of control. Hofmann directly links the strength of the reflective system with working memory. Imagine that you’re stranded alone on a life raft at sea, and you’ve rationed your supplies to give yourself the best chance of survival. Among other items, you’ve got a few chocolate bars, and you know that you should limit yourself to just one square a day. But there’s a war going on inside your head. The impulsive system urges you to scarf down the whole chocolate bar—C’mon, you’re hungry. You need to eat the whole candy bar now. The reflective system cautions you to stick to one square a day—Don’t give in to temptation. Make it last. It’ll be better for you in the long run. Whether you gobble up the entire bar or ration it out depends on the strength of your working memory. According to Hofmann, the stronger your working memory is, the better your reflective system is at controlling your impulsive system. Prior to the unexpected windfall, Whittaker had to exercise financial restraint to ensure that he didn’t overspend. This required his Conductor to moderate spending by engaging the reflective system: I really want that mansion, but I can’t afford it. But after his lottery win, he was in a financial position where any shiny thing that caught his eye—from diamonds to speedboats—could be had without reflection. Because moderation of his spending was no longer required, his Conductor basically retired from its job, and the impulsive system reigned unchecked. As Whittaker’s self-control vanished, so did his lottery winnings. As one of Whittaker’s friends aptly observed to USA Today, the win “overwhelmed him … the more you have, the more difficult it is to resist temptation.” Out of Control Working memory plays a pivotal role in addiction, whether it’s addiction to drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, overeating, shopping, gambling, pornography, or even video gaming. The stronger your Conductor, the easier it is to resist addictive behavior. The weaker your Conductor, the more likely you are to fall into the grips of addiction. Have you ever wanted something so badly, been involved in something so deeply, or been fixated on something so intensely that nothing else seems to matter? Even if the object of your obsession is bad for your health, relationships, career, or finances? And even if it is ruining your life? You’re certainly not alone. Just take a look at the numbers. More than 68 million Americans smoke. Nearly 30 million are affected by substance abuse, and another 22 million adults are addicted to Internet pornography. As many as 24 million are compulsive shoppers, and 6 to 8 million are problem gamblers. And don’t forget the estimated 75 million adults and 12.5 million kids who are obese. Why do so many of us become enslaved to our bad habits and addictions? The Addicted Brain In 2011, the American Society of Addiction Medicine redefined addiction as “a chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory, and related circuitry.” Nora Volkow, an eminent neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, is the leading researcher in the area of the addicted brain. The great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky, Volkow is making her own mark on history with more than a decade of peer-reviewed research suggesting that addictive behaviors become compulsive because the brain’s control mechanism is disrupted. Here is what is happening in the addicted brain. Salience and Reward Salience is the relative importance of an object or behavior, and reward is the pleasurable feelings we derive from that object or behavior. Salience and reward are closely linked in the addicted brain. Addictive substances and behaviors are extremely high in salience to addicts, which means they focus their attention on them. When addicted people engage in addictive behavior, the nucleus accumbens, located deep within the brain, releases a big hit of dopamine, the reward neurotransmitter. Eating a chocolate bar gives you a little squirt of dopamine; eating a hot fudge sundae with cookies ’n’ cream ice cream, whipped cream, sprinkles, and nuts delivers a heftier dose of the neurotransmitter. And taking a drug like heroin causes a huge surge of dopamine. The reward that an addict gets from the dopamine gives that activity great salience, making it their singular focus. Memory People who have addictions remember the salience of the activity because the event is registered in both the amygdala and hippocampus. The brain’s emotional center, the amygdala, registers the intense salience and reward and locks it into the memory bank, the hippocampus. Drive Drive is what motivates addicts to continue in their behavior. It pushes them to repeat the behavior again and again. Drive originates in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and the anterior cingulate gyrus (ACG), brain regions often associated with working memory. Further research is necessary to determine the degree to which working memory is involved in drive. What happens when an addict craves a drug, is that their OFC and ACG become hyperactive and boost drive intensely. If working memory is involved in drive, it may be like a broken record, replaying the desire to procure the reward, over and over. Indeed, these regions of an addict’s brain resemble those of people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorders. (Out of) Control The control aspect in this process is located in the PFC, the home of working memory. For nonaddicts, the PFC helps them resist harmful behavior. For example, when you put your hand over the top of the wine glass rather than accepting another glass, your PFC has been activated to make that decision. But in the addict’s brain, this behavior is reversed: when a person is engaged in the addictive behavior, the PFC is turned down to low. As you would expect, this diminished activity is associated with less self-monitoring and behavioral control. It’s as if the Conductor has left the stage. The salience of how good the addictive substance or activity feels overrides the PFC’s ability to rein in the behavior. When an addicted person craves something, as opposed to being engaged in the behavior or using the substance, the PFC increases in activation. While the person is craving, the PFC recruits working memory to bring up the past memories of the salience and reward, as well as to strategize how to satisfy the urge. In the addicted brain, the working memory Conductor, which should be in control, is under the control of the addiction. The Addiction Process In the addicted brain, working memory is recruited as a key component of the addictive process, helping to satisfy the addiction rather than inhibiting it. For illustrative purposes, this image shows the addictive process linearly, though the various stages may not always occur in this sequence. We got a firsthand glimpse into obsessive behavior when Ross bought a really cool first-person video game about a week before Christmas in 2003. During the day, Ross was a mild-mannered academic, but at night he morphed into an ex–Navy SEAL working in the top-secret Third Echelon subbranch of the National Security Agency. Ross was entrusted with saving the United States from a breakout war with China. He used his stealth and considerable military acumen to stalk enemies and infiltrate their headquarters, even rescuing the United States from the detonation of a nuclear bomb. You would think Tracy would have been proud of all his hard work and his determination to see the mission through. But in spite of the fact that Ross had single-handedly prevented World War III, she was concerned that he was spending too much time in this fantasy world. He did, after all, skip all of his favorite Christmas activities: going to the German Christmas market in Edinburgh with its steaming mugs of gl?hwein, hiking in the snow, making Christmas cookies and candy, and caroling on Christmas Eve. The video game had turned Ross into a veritable Christmas Grinch. For Christmas Day, Tracy banned him from playing. And although Ross found himself moping about and fretting nonstop about what might happen if the game’s shadowy criminal activated the nuclear device while he was celebrating the holiday, he realized that maybe Tracy was right: he had fallen into the grips of video game obsession. He snapped the disc in two and swore off video gaming for good, a pledge yet unbroken. A lot of gamers are able to moderate the siren call of really awesome video games and do other things aside from assaulting the Sith Lord, winning the Grand Prix, or building a new civilization. But research shows that one in ten video gamers nationwide exhibit signs of addictive behavior. The web is full of stories from gamers who have become obsessed to the detriment of their work and relationships. Consider the following confession posted on a gaming website about addiction to a popular online game: I had a wife, 3 houses, 3 cars, money in the bank. I stopped working. I went through a divorce. I had to sell a house. I had to sell a car. I have nothing in my bank account now, but good thing my game account is paid in full a year in advance. My credit is in ruins. I don’t care. Marriages are ruined, children neglected, and financial futures destroyed. The Chinese government’s deep concern about the negative effect of Internet gaming addiction on many of its citizens may have been behind its ban of the popular online game World of Warcraft (WoW) in 2009. That same year, a group of Taiwanese researchers led by Wei-Chen Lin undertook a groundbreaking study to discover what was happening in the brains of gaming addicts when anticipating a chance to play. They recruited ten heavy users of WoW who had made it to the top levels of the game by regularly playing over thirty hours a week. They also recruited ten nongamers who used the Internet less than two hours a day. The researchers put them in an fMRI scanner and showed them a series of pictures, alternating between a neutral image and a WoW game image. It is important to note that they did not scan the participants while playing the game. They showed them pictures because they wanted to trigger a craving response in the brain. As expected, the scans of the nongamer brains showed no difference between WoW images and the neutral images. When the WoW gamers saw the neutral images, their brains looked much like those of the nongamers. But when they saw the game images, the fMRI display screens lit up like a Christmas tree. The nucleus accumbens activated, anticipating the dopamine hit that came from playing the game—for example, when their character completed a quest, saved a friend, or slew a foe. The PFC powered up and put working memory to work to figure out how to get that dopamine hit by executing a plan to play the game. The fact that this study looked at the brain activity when the participants were craving the addictive behavior as opposed to engaging in it explains why the PFC lit up. As we described earlier in the addicted brain model, craving changes the way the PFC and working memory function. The PFC and working memory, which moderate and control behavior in the nonaddicted brain, were in fact recruited in the craving process, enabling it, and finding a way to get that dopamine hit. When it comes to fulfilling a craving for an addictive substance or behavior, working memory becomes an enemy rather than a friend. When Working Memory Failures Threaten Your Health Is your working memory also working against you when you want to lose weight but can’t seem to step away from the dessert tray? Do you just lack willpower? Or is something else preventing you from getting control over your eating? Consider Michael, a man from New York who weighed twelve hundred pounds. Partly encouraged by an obese mother, he liked to start the day with four bowls of cereal, toast, waffles, cake, and a quart of soda, and end it with a pizza. Michael tried diet after diet, but he was unable to control his urges. New science suggests that some of us may in fact be addicted to fat. Considering that two-thirds of U.S. adults are overweight or obese, it is clear that a lot of us are eating more than our fair share of fatty foods, and it is having a devastating impact on our working memory. A 2007 study in the journal Appetite found that obese children perform worse on tests involving working memory compared to their non-obese peers. When you hit middle age, it doesn’t get any better. In 2010, researchers from the University of Texas at Austin found that when obese individuals performed a working memory task, there was less activation in a brain area associated with working memory compared to normal-weight people or those who were just somewhat overweight. In 2003, scientists at Boston University found that senior citizens who were obese and had hypertension had poorer working memory skills. Other research appearing in Current Alzheimer’s Research in 2007 shows that being obese in midlife is linked to cognitive disease later in life. People who were obese in middle age were five times more likely to be diagnosed with vascular dementia and three times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s. And don’t think you’re off the hook if you’re just a little pudgy rather than outright obese. In this same study, people who were overweight were two times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s or vascular dementia in their not-so-golden years. These studies with humans offer a useful first step in understanding the link between overeating and working memory. More recent research has benefited from using rats in order to more rigorously control experimental conditions—like altering brain cells or introducing electrical shocks—allowing scientists to learn how overeating can be addictive and ultimately impair working memory. In 2010, neuroscientists Paul Johnson and Paul Kenny of the Scripps Research Institute in Florida set out to understand how fatty foods can act like a drug in the brain to send the reward system spiraling out of control. They took three groups of rats and fed them a variety of diets to see how fatty foods affected their brain and weight. Group 1—we’ll call them the smorgasbord rats—enjoyed nearly unlimited access to high-fat foods, kind of like going to an all-you-can-eat buffet—including some human favorites like bacon, sausage, chocolate, and cheesecake. Group 2—we’ll call them the restrained rats—had access to the same fatty foods but only for a short period once a day. Group 3, a control group—we’ll call them the healthy rats—had access to only healthy rat food. Can you guess what happened? It’s no big surprise that the smorgasbord rats ended up consuming twice as many calories as the healthy rats and quickly grew obese. The researchers then conditioned the rats: every time a light went on, they would receive a mild electrical shock. The next time the groups went to feed, the researchers turned on the light and waited to see what would happen. The restrained rats and the healthy rats refused to eat when the light was switched on, but the smorgasbord rats went straight for their food. They had become so addicted to the fatty fare that the threat of a mild electrical shock couldn’t deter them from scarfing down every bite. Johnson and Kenny also wanted to explore more fully the role of dopamine in food addiction. As we’ve said, a person who becomes addicted to a substance tends to need more and more of it to get that same surge of dopamine. That’s because an addicted brain has fewer dopamine receptors to receive the dopamine signals. Johnson and Kenny wanted to find out what the smorgasbord rats would do if they had fewer dopamine receptors, so they inserted a virus in their brain to attack the receptors. The researchers expected that the rats would gradually adjust and eat less of the fatty food because it didn’t provide the same dopamine high. Imagine their surprise when they found that the rats resorted to eating even more to try to achieve the same high. So if you’ve ever wondered why it takes three candy bars to get the same satisfaction when it used to take only one, now you know that your brain might be compensating for the declining dopamine receptors. This also helps explain why some of us continue to gorge on fattening foods even though we hate the fact that we can barely zip up our pants, have type 2 diabetes, and are saddled with high blood pressure. The research on diet and working memory also suggests that overindulgence in fatty foods directly assaults your working memory. Andrew Murray and colleagues at the University of Oxford took two groups of rats. Both were fed a healthy diet for up to two months and were given a working memory test for rats known as a radial maze task. This commonly used task for measuring working memory in rats uses an elevated platform with eight arms that extend from the maze in the center. The rats learn which of the arms have a food reward hidden out of sight at the end of the arm. A working memory error is counted when the rat goes to an arm with no food even though the animal looked there previously. This is considered a working memory task because the rat has to navigate the maze and at the same time hold in mind where it has already been. The researchers noted the scores of the groups. After this test, they fed one group a high-fat diet for nine days and retested the two groups. The rats on the healthy diet blasted through the maze, and though they weren’t perfect, they scored slightly higher than they did the first time. The rats on the high-fat diet took a lot longer to complete the maze than they did the first time and made more mistakes. The high-fat diet apparently diminished their working memory ability. Other theories about specific foods that turn the brain reward system against us abound. In 2009, David Kessler suggested that it’s foods that combine salt, sugar, and fat that do a number on the brain’s reward system and lead to overconsumption and obesity. Sugar has also been implicated on its own, including high-fructose corn syrup, maltose, dextrose, and dozens of other sugar sources found in our food supply. As scientists attempt to pinpoint a single food, category of food, or combination of foods that trip up our reward system, it seems that it’s when we overindulge in these foods that it becomes a problem. After all, it is important to remember that the human body needs fat for a healthy brain, needs glucose to think clearly, and needs salt. But when we overindulge, our working memory suffers. When the Feel-Good Neurotransmitter Doesn’t Feel Good At the other end of the eating disorder spectrum are people with anorexia nervosa. Anna Patterson, a young woman who blogs about anorexia, was convinced that despite weighing eighty-nine pounds, she still needed to get rid of her “fat” stomach, and although she refused to eat, she couldn’t stop fixating on food. While it appears that people who eat too much do so at least in part because they’ve become addicted to the dopamine hit they get from an order of french fries or a piece of crispy bacon, new research has shown that people with anorexia don’t respond the same way to dopamine. In 2012, Walter Kaye compared the brain activity of recovering anorexic women with a healthy group of women of the same age and used a PET scanner to determine the effect of dopamine in their brains. He gave both groups of women a single oral dose of the drug amphetamine, which resulted in a big dopamine release. For most people, the dopamine hit equals pleasure, and as expected, the healthy women experienced feelings of pleasure and euphoria. When Kaye looked at the scans of the healthy women, he saw activation in an area containing the nucleus accumbens, which is filled with dopamine receptors. Conversely, the brain scans of the recovering anorexics revealed activation in the dorsal caudate, a part of the brain that worries about consequences. In other words, for anorexic individuals, pleasure automatically brings feelings of guilt and worry. Sure enough, when the anorexic women were asked to complete a questionnaire on anxiety, they showed very high levels, lasting over three hours after having received the dopamine hit. For them, their out-of-control behavior was not about pursuing pleasure but rather a desire to avoid the feelings of guilt and anxiety that accompany the dopamine release that comes with eating. Being “addicted to starvation,” as biologist Valerie Campan calls it, or simply being hooked on self-control is also linked to working memory problems. It seems that too little pleasure can become just as addictive as too much, and working memory suffers in both extremes. In 2006, Australian psychologist Eva Kemps recruited a group of anorexic women and healthy women, and gave them a series of tests as well as a questionnaire about food. She found that the anorexic women reported having more intrusive thoughts about food, weight, and body shape. And while the anorexics and healthy women had similar IQ scores, she argued that the anorexics suffered from a diminished working memory. In 2009, Arne Zastrow and colleagues at the University of Heidelberg took this further to look at brain scans of women with anorexia. They recruited a group of fifteen anorexic women and fifteen healthy women and asked them to perform a task that involved processing and monitoring information while they were in a brain scanner. The task was to keep a target shape in mind, like a circle or triangle, and press a button to identify this shape from other shapes. Another component of the task was that the target shape would change so the women had to mentally discard the previous shape and update their working memory with the new target. Clinicians commonly use this cognitive task to measure how quickly people can adapt when the rules of the game change. As in the Kemp study, the anorexic women made more errors than their healthy counterparts, indicating cognitive inflexibility: they find it difficult to disengage from one idea and move to another, which may explain why they display rigidity in behavior. As you recall, a strong working memory helps you shift your focus, suggesting that working memory is impaired in people with anorexia. It is likely part of the reason that it is so hard for people with this disorder to shift from the notion that food is “bad” and to start thinking of it as something enjoyable that promotes good health. The brain scans in Zastrow’s study offered some insight into why this happens. The scans showed that a number of brain areas involved with motivation were underactive in the anorexic women. The healthy women also showed greater activation in their PFC, demonstrating that they were eliciting their working memory to solve the task. But the anorexic women did not show any activation in the PFC, suggesting that their working memory was on cruise control. The disadvantages of a poor working memory are clear: when our Conductor falters we realize just how vital it is for our financial, psychological, and physical well-being. Having a poor working memory is linked to a greater risk for unhealthy habits and behaviors that can leave you bankrupt, addicted, obese, or all of these. And to exacerbate the problem, out-of-control behaviors may also drain your working memory or even recruit it to work against your best interests. 5 (#ulink_2a1bf3d2-0c7d-55ab-9259-e9bc2f26047e) The Most Important Learning Tool (#ulink_2a1bf3d2-0c7d-55ab-9259-e9bc2f26047e) Working Memory in School (#ulink_2a1bf3d2-0c7d-55ab-9259-e9bc2f26047e) IQ SCORES HAVE LONG been held as the benchmark for academic success. But in our own research, we found that relying on IQ to predict success is flawed. When Tracy began investigating working memory, IQ, and academic achievement, she wanted to find out which cognitive skills were most important in predicting a child’s success in school. For one of her first published studies, she recruited almost two hundred kindergartners and gave them a variety of tests, including working memory and IQ tests. When she compared their scores on these tests with their grades, she was taken aback by the results. The students’ IQ scores were surprisingly inaccurate in determining how well they would do in school, contrary to what you might think. According to her findings, students can have an average IQ score but perform poorly in school. For example, one of the kindergartners in this study, Andrew, had an average IQ score, but by the time he reached second grade, he was struggling to keep up with his classmates. If IQ was a good predictor of success, then Andrew shouldn’t have had such a tough time in school. His IQ wasn’t the reason he was doing poorly. When Tracy looked at Andrew’s working memory score, she noticed that it was low compared to his peers. In fact, if you stood him in a line of one hundred children of the same age, Andrew would be at the end of that line when it came to his working memory skills. Andrew’s poor working memory score correlated to his poor performance in school. The same held true for the other kindergartners. Tracy found that working memory could predict what grade students would get with far greater accuracy than IQ. In fact, if Tracy knew a child’s working memory, she could determine his or her academic skills with 95 percent accuracy. When we looked at the youngsters’ grades six years later, we found that working memory had such a powerful impact on learning that by knowing their working memory in kindergarten, we could also predict with 95 percent accuracy what their grades would be in the sixth grade. In another study, Tracy wanted to identify the key cognitive skill required for success in learning the most basic school subjects: reading, comprehension, spelling, and math. She tracked nearly seventy students aged seven to eleven for two years. She tested their working memory and IQ and then compared those scores with their academic achievement in these four subjects. When she analyzed the data and compared working memory to IQ, she once again found that IQ contributed very little to achievement. On the other hand, working memory was the most important cognitive skill, and a strong working memory meant strong grades. Other research groups have also reported this exciting finding of how working memory skills lay the foundation for school success. Linda Siegel, the Chair in Special Education at the University of British Columbia, Canada, has published several key pieces of research highlighting the importance of working memory in learning. In one study with seven- to thirteen-year-olds, she found that poor working memory can result in reading problems, as well as difficulty with arithmetic and computation. British psychologist Rebecca Bull echoed this finding with British students and found that if students have poor working memory, they have lower mathematical ability because they are not able to process and work with all the necessary numerical information. Their poor working memory skills also mean that they find it difficult to integrate different mathematical concepts, something that is commonly required in solving word problems. In the United States, psychologist David Geary at the University of Missouri–Columbia has spent nearly a decade investigating the importance of working memory in math skills. In one of his many studies, he followed children from kindergarten to fifth grade and found that those who struggled most in math had lower working memory scores compared to their schoolmates. A wealth of research also points to working memory as the most important cognitive skill in language acquisition. Researchers from the University of California studied high school students over three years and identified working memory as the key skill that determined success in reading and comprehension. Adding to these findings are numerous studies from Susan Ellis Weismer and her colleagues at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Weismer’s work shows that working memory is critical for learning grammar as well as new vocabulary words. In her studies, the students typically have average IQ skills but poor working memory, so they offer an ideal opportunity to disentangle the contribution of working memory to learning from what IQ can offer. Weismer has reported that even if students have average IQ skills, their poor working memory makes it hard to learn new words and remember the grammatical rules. In particular, she has found that people with average IQ but poor working memory have more difficulty learning if the information is presented quickly. Tracy’s contributions to the growing body of evidence on working memory and learning skills include another study in which she compared the IQ and working memory scores in six- to eleven-year-olds. In this study, she found a causal relationship between working memory and language (reading, writing, and comprehension) and math skills. The strength of the children’s working memory determined how well they would do in these subjects. With the evidence from Tracy and other researchers mounting, it has become crystal clear: if we want to know how well students will perform in the classroom, we need to look at their working memory. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». 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