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

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.

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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.