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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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. СКАЧАТЬ