The New IQ: Use Your Working Memory to Think Stronger, Smarter, Faster. Tracy Alloway
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Название: The New IQ: Use Your Working Memory to Think Stronger, Smarter, Faster
Автор: Tracy Alloway
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Интернет
isbn: 9780007468768
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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.
How Working Memory Makes Us Happier
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: