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

How Working Memory Makes Us Happier (#ulink_026e76af-7223-5339-8f18-86ec4eac8c19)

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:

1-Back Task

Sad Happy Sad Sad Neutral

2-Back Task

Sad Neutral Sad Happy Neutral Happy Happy

The words that are repeated in the 1-back or 2-back task are in bold.

Levens and Gotlib measured the speed and accuracy of the responses. There was no significant difference between the depressed and nondepressed groups on the 1-back task. The difference emerged when it came to remembering the emotional expressions on the 2-back task, the task that engages working memory. The depressed individuals were faster in matching sad faces, while the non-depressed adults were quicker in matching happy faces. The psychologists suggest that the way we use working memory to process emotions played a role in this difference. They conclude that depressed individuals were more likely to keep sad emotions in their working memory, while the non-depressed people keep happy emotions in their working memory. This suggests that your working memory Conductor can be a double-edged sword when it comes to happiness: you can use it to fixate on the bad, or the good. Paraphrasing Aristotle, it’s your choice. But as we will see, those with a stronger working memory tend to choose happiness.

To take her research a step further, Levens teamed up with Elizabeth Phelps of New York University to investigate what happens in the brain when people use working memory to process emotional information. They asked participants to perform working memory tasks in which they had to recognize positive and negative emotions. Participants were first shown a string of negative emotional words—like murder and terror—on a computer screen. They were then shown a single word (known as the target word) and asked to determine whether it was in the list of negative words they had just seen. The experimenters did the same with positive words. These tasks required the participants to use working memory to keep in mind the lists and then compare the target word with the lists. At the same time, the scientists observed the brain activity of the participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans. The scans revealed that blood rushed to the PFC, and the researchers showed that working memory plays a role in judging positive and negative emotions. But distinguishing between positive and negative thoughts isn’t the same as feeling a negative or positive emotion. So does having a strong working memory actually help make us feel happier?

Working Memory Fires Up the Feel-Good Brain Chemicals

The human brain is coursing with chemicals that create happy feelings. Two of these feel-good chemicals are the neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin. Dopamine is a pleasure and motivation chemical that is released in the brain whenever you do something enjoyable. The quick hit of dopamine produces a short-term feeling of euphoria, which encourages you to repeat the behavior. Serotonin is known as the Zen neurotransmitter because it is associated with feelings of deep and subtle satisfaction and long-term happiness. Serotonin is so critical to happiness that the most commonly prescribed antidepressants work by increasing its level in the brain.

Exciting research is showing some surprising links between working memory and the production of both dopamine and serotonin. One study from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, used positron emission tomography (PET) scans to investigate the relationship between working memory and dopamine. The first step in this trial was to test the participants’ working memory to identify individuals with high and low working memory. Then both the strong and weak working memory groups underwent PET scans to measure dopamine production in their brains. The researchers found that the brains of participants with good working memory made more dopamine, while those with poor working memory made less.

In another study conducted at the Heinrich-Heine University in Germany by Ruediger Grandt and colleagues, PET scans were used to examine whether there is any link between working memory and serotonin. The study revealed that when participants performed a working memory task that involved remembering a sequence of faces, they experienced an increase of serotonin that participants completing a non–working memory task did not experience. What we find particularly exciting about this study is that it is the act of using working memory that was linked to the surge in serotonin. In other words, simply using your working memory may make you happier. If you are feeling grumpy, you may want to try to engage in activities that use your working memory, to see if that dopamine and serotonin boost can improve your mood.

Working Memory and the Glass Half Empty

At the other end of the spectrum, we wanted to investigate how working memory is related to unhappiness, in particular, depression and rumination. Rumination is the term psychologists use when people fixate on things, often negative. It is an unproductive style of thinking that is difficult to control or stop, and it tends to be linked with strong emotions like worry and fear. It is like your working memory Conductor is playing the same sad song over and over again.

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, a psychologist at Yale University, has been investigating rumination for more than a decade, and her research indicates that people who ruminate are more likely to develop depression; moreover, they experience more severe symptoms of depression. We wondered what effect rumination might have on working memory and discovered that emerging evidence suggests a relationship. Robert Hester and Hugh Garavan of Dublin’s Trinity College artificially increased rumination on negative thoughts by showing adults lists of words with negative connotations like murder, anger, and fight. They found that rumination not only made people more depressed but also impaired their working memory.

In a related 2008 study, psychologists Jutta Joorman and Ian Gotlib gave two groups of people a task that required them to update information continually in their working memory, as well as trying to inhibit words with negative connotations. One group of participants was suffering from depression and the other was not. They found that the depressed individuals had more difficulty in not mulling over negative words, which inhibited their working memory.

We wanted to investigate these links ourselves, so we spent three months researching a group of more than one hundred twenty-somethings. We chose people in their twenties because these are the years in which people tend to move out of their parents’ home, make new friends, and explore new ideas, and though this transition into adulthood can be exciting, it can also be a stressful time and result in a sense of feeling overwhelmed and even depressed. Because this age group faces so many challenges to their happiness, they presented a good opportunity for us to explore how working memory helps us to manage our emotions and stay positive.

The twenty-somethings in our study performed several cognitive tasks. First, they completed a working memory task from Tracy’s Alloway Working Memory Assessment (AWMA). We asked them questions such as, “Oranges live in water. True or false?” and then asked them to repeat the last word of the statement. Questions like this engage working memory because the brain is forced to hold the sentence in mind and decide if it’s a true statement while repeating the last word. We then divided the participants into those with strong and weak working memory.

We also asked these young adults to complete questionnaires often used in hospitals and clinics to provide an objective measure of depression. This required participants to rate statements depending on how strongly they felt each applied to them during the past week. Some statements expressed negative feelings such as, “I was bothered by things that don’t usually bother me.” Others expressed positive feelings such as, “I felt hopeful about the future.” Based on their responses, we determined whether they were depressed. We also measured their tendency for rumination using a similar questionnaire.

We had hypothesized that ruminators and depressed participants would have relatively poor working memory and that ruminators would be depressed. But when we analyzed the working memory scores, depression status, and propensity for rumination among the young adults, we made some very surprising findings: not all of the ruminators had low working memory scores, and not all ruminators were depressed. The ruminators who had good working memory were less likely to suffer depression compared to the ruminators who had poor working memory. Our interpretation is that though their working memory Conductor plays the same song, it is also strong enough to inhibit the negative emotions associated with depression.

Working Memory and the Glass Half Full

The results of our study on working memory, rumination, and depression were an exciting start because they revealed that people do use working memory to manage emotions, resolve problems, and avoid slipping into depression. Encouraged by these findings, we looked at the opposite end of the happiness scale to determine if a strong working memory makes people more likely to choose optimism.

To explore this question, we joined forces with the British Science Festival, a hugely popular annual event celebrating science, engineering, and technology. With help in promoting our study and inviting festivalgoers to participate in it, we were able to conduct another large-scale study involving thousands of adults. The scale of the study helped us understand how working memory influences happiness and if a strong working memory will make you more likely to see the glass half full.

For this study, participants completed a working memory test and filled out the Life Orientation Test, a clinical questionnaire that gauges levels of optimism and pessimism. We also asked participants to answer yes or no to the following questions:

1 In uncertain times, I usually expect the best.

2 I’m always optimistic about my future.

3 If something can go wrong for me, it will. I rarely count on good things happening to me.

When we looked at their responses, we found a correlation between the strength of working memory and level of optimism. Those with stronger working memory were more likely to have a high level of optimism, while those with weaker working memory tended to be more pessimistic. These results suggest that people with high working memory tend to be more hopeful and confident about the future, while those with weak working memory tend to be more pessimistic.

The research we have examined so far in this chapter suggests that a good working memory is associated with happiness and optimism. It’s not a direct causal relationship because happiness is complex, and many factors—both personal and cultural—play into personal happiness. So although a strong working memory can’t guarantee optimism, it can set your feet more firmly on the path to fulfillment.

One of the huge benefits of optimism is a longer and more satisfying life. Becca Levy’s research at the University of Yale’s School of Public Health demonstrated that older adults who are optimistic about aging live an average of 7.5 years longer than their less optimistic counterparts. An optimistic outlook is also associated with a healthier life. For example, Hillary Tindale and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh found that optimism reduces the risk of coronary heart disease, which can lead to death. In their study of almost one hundred thousand women aged fifty to seventy-nine, they compared the 25 percent most optimistic with the 25 percent most pessimistic and found that the optimistic women had less risk of cardiovascular problems, as well as reduced risk for diabetes and hypertension. A study with men followed over a ten-year period found similar results: those who were optimistic were less likely to develop coronary heart disease as they aged compared to those who were pessimistic.

Less Is More

At the end of this chapter, we share some simple exercises to help you strengthen your working memory, but in the meantime let’s take a quick look at a few coping strategies to improve both working memory and happiness.

In Chapter 2 (#ue80854d3-0353-55a4-9c25-c5526ae14684), we introduced you to our friend Sam who struggled to wade through all the possibilities after losing his job. Too many choices result in psychological stress and unhappiness. A 2010 study by Hazel Markus and Barry Schwartz published in the Journal of American Consumer Research backed this up, finding that although American culture venerates choice and freedom, people often become paralyzed by unlimited choice and are less happy with their decisions as a result.

As you saw in Chapter 2 (#ue80854d3-0353-55a4-9c25-c5526ae14684), an excess of choice can overload your working memory and lead to lots of negative consequences, including an increase in stress and anxiety, an inability to make a decision, and even ruminating over whether you’ve made the right choice. So one way to improve your happiness is to minimize the number of choices you have to make. At the office, for example, you might want to dedicate specific chunks of time to specific tasks and open only one program on your computer screen rather than toggling between multiple windows and switching back and forth between options.

At home, many of us feel that rushing our children off to five activities a day will improve their lives and make them happier. The reality is that offering your children too many choices of extracurricular activities may overwhelm them and reduce how well they perform in the activities they do pursue. By choosing a few activities and focusing on some relaxing downtime in which the family reconnects, there will be less working memory overload, and everyone will feel less stressed and happier.

Limiting your consumer choices will help too. At the supermarket, interesting packaging or new products compete for our attention. Sometimes it’s hard to decide which of the ten different brands of the same product to buy. In order to limit the number of choices and not get overwhelmed, make a list of exactly what you need before you go to the market, and stick to it.

Our friend Sam who fell into depression because he couldn’t decide what next job to pursue, found that narrowing his choices helped immensely. After a few weeks of his malaise, Sam’s wife encouraged him to seek the advice of a career coach, who helped him focus on one or two more immediate tasks and goals. His working memory was then able to better digest the information he had to consider, his stress lifted, and he became happier. He was able to make a list of potential jobs and started sending out his newly updated CV. Two weeks later, he landed an interview.

Confronting Fears and Challenges

One afternoon Ann, a corporate lawyer who had recently made partner, discovered a large bump in her lower back. She immediately started worrying that it was a cancerous tumor, but since she was so overwhelmed with her new job responsibilities, she avoided going to the doctor and tried to put the situation out of her mind. But the more she tried to suppress the thought, the more she kept going over catastrophic possibilities in her mind. Within a few weeks, she was very depressed. She had trouble focusing on work, got distracted in meetings, made faulty judgments on cases, and started to forget to return phone calls to her clients. In short, her working memory was impaired.

Some fascinating research suggests that failing to address our problems undermines our working memory. One such study conducted by scientists at Harvard, Cornell, and the University of Texas researched the fight-or-flight mechanism in mice and found that mice who ran away from a variety of challenging situations (such as interacting with bigger, more aggressive mice) suffered weight loss, lower sex drive, and insomnia, and they had a change in levels of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). Previous research has shown that low levels of BDNF are associated with both a compromised working memory and depression, but the exact nature of this complex relationship has yet to be determined.

The mice who interacted with the larger mice had regular sleep, a healthy sex life, normal eating, and no change in their BDNF levels. The authors suggest that the discovery has an important implication: dealing with your problems enhances resiliency. They draw on Rachel Yehuda’s research on working memory and stress, which we discussed in Chapter 2 (#ue80854d3-0353-55a4-9c25-c5526ae14684), to highlight how resiliency is evident after exposure to stressful situations and resilient people show optimism in the face of adversity. So let’s return for a moment to Ann, who was busy at work and put off dealing with her problem. As a result, her working memory—and her work—was adversely affected by the stress. When Ann’s best friend pleaded with her to get over her fear of going to the doctor and get the bump checked out, she finally decided to listen to her. The doctor took a biopsy, and it turned out that the bump was not malignant. The bottom line is if you avoid dealing with your problems, it can diminish your working memory and make you more susceptible to depression. This can have a knock-on effect, because a poor working memory also undermines your ability to deal appropriately with the fallout that comes from avoiding problems in the first place. By dealing with your problems head on, you at least have the benefit of a fully functioning working memory so you can adapt to whatever comes your way.