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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 fiancé’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 СКАЧАТЬ