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

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 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 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.

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