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

When Good Fortune Goes Bad

In this down economy, who hasn’t fantasized about winning the lottery? We certainly have. But should we beware of what we wish for? As you’ve probably heard, many people who win the lottery report later that they are no happier, and many ultimately find the large sums of money a burden rather than a blessing. This seems terribly ironic, but we think it may be related to interference with working memory and in a way that illuminates the role of working memory in impulsive behavior.

Take the case of Andrew Jackson “Jack” Whittaker whose $1 lottery ticket purchased at a gas station turned him into the biggest single U.S. lottery winner at the time: $314 million, which translated to a onetime payout of $113 million after taxes. If any lottery hopeful could handle a big win, you would think it would be Whittaker. He was already successful when he won. He had a net worth in the millions and was the president of a West Virginia–based contracting firm with more than one hundred employees.

In the flush of excitement, Whittaker pledged a portion of his winning to various organizations and set up a nonprofit organization to support low-income families. But it didn’t take long before careful planning gave way to unbridled extravagance. The man who had made his millions with hard work and self-control was now thrust into a world in which he had so much money that he seems to have lost sight of its value and of his control in spending it.

In the first year, he had already spent $45 million. His personal plan of spending time with his wife of over forty years and adoring granddaughter never came to fruition. Instead, the Washington Post quoted him as saying, “If they want quality time with me, they have to get up earlier or go to bed a lot later.” Between the trips to the racetrack and slot machines and buying property for development, it was no wonder he had less, not more, family time. And of course, Whittaker lived up to the stereotype of lottery winners by buying numerous cars and houses for himself, family members, and acquaintances. Five years after his win, he claimed that thieves had stolen a lot of money from him and that he was broke. He also had been charged with assault and drunk driving.

Although Whittaker’s tale is not unique when it comes to big-ticket lottery winners, it is uncommon that such a tale begins with someone who was already wealthy. The reason this is relevant here is that Whittaker’s case provokes the question: Why wasn’t someone with experience in managing large amounts of money better prepared to manage his winnings better than most other winners? What turned him into such an impulsive spender?

Wilhelm Hofmann, from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business’s Center for Decision Research, offers clues to the answer. He has spent several years researching decision making, impulsivity, and working memory. In a 2009 paper, he theorized a model of two significant influences in decision making—an impulsive system and a reflective system:

Impulsive system: This system is automatic, unconsidered, and hedonistic, and it encourages us to do whatever feels good.

Reflective system: This system is rational and involves strategic planning to achieve goals, deliberate judgment, and exercise of control. Hofmann directly links the strength of the reflective system with working memory.

Imagine that you’re stranded alone on a life raft at sea, and you’ve rationed your supplies to give yourself the best chance of survival. Among other items, you’ve got a few chocolate bars, and you know that you should limit yourself to just one square a day. But there’s a war going on inside your head. The impulsive system urges you to scarf down the whole chocolate bar—C’mon, you’re hungry. You need to eat the whole candy bar now. The reflective system cautions you to stick to one square a day—Don’t give in to temptation. Make it last. It’ll be better for you in the long run.

Whether you gobble up the entire bar or ration it out depends on the strength of your working memory. According to Hofmann, the stronger your working memory is, the better your reflective system is at controlling your impulsive system.

Prior to the unexpected windfall, Whittaker had to exercise financial restraint to ensure that he didn’t overspend. This required his Conductor to moderate spending by engaging the reflective system: I really want that mansion, but I can’t afford it. But after his lottery win, he was in a financial position where any shiny thing that caught his eye—from diamonds to speedboats—could be had without reflection. Because moderation of his spending was no longer required, his Conductor basically retired from its job, and the impulsive system reigned unchecked. As Whittaker’s self-control vanished, so did his lottery winnings. As one of Whittaker’s friends aptly observed to USA Today, the win “overwhelmed him … the more you have, the more difficult it is to resist temptation.”

Out of Control

Working memory plays a pivotal role in addiction, whether it’s addiction to drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, overeating, shopping, gambling, pornography, or even video gaming. The stronger your Conductor, the easier it is to resist addictive behavior. The weaker your Conductor, the more likely you are to fall into the grips of addiction.

Have you ever wanted something so badly, been involved in something so deeply, or been fixated on something so intensely that nothing else seems to matter? Even if the object of your obsession is bad for your health, relationships, career, or finances? And even if it is ruining your life? You’re certainly not alone. Just take a look at the numbers. More than 68 million Americans smoke. Nearly 30 million are affected by substance abuse, and another 22 million adults are addicted to Internet pornography. As many as 24 million are compulsive shoppers, and 6 to 8 million are problem gamblers. And don’t forget the estimated 75 million adults and 12.5 million kids who are obese. Why do so many of us become enslaved to our bad habits and addictions?

The Addicted Brain

In 2011, the American Society of Addiction Medicine redefined addiction as “a chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory, and related circuitry.” Nora Volkow, an eminent neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, is the leading researcher in the area of the addicted brain. The great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky, Volkow is making her own mark on history with more than a decade of peer-reviewed research suggesting that addictive behaviors become compulsive because the brain’s control mechanism is disrupted. Here is what is happening in the addicted brain.

Salience and Reward

Salience is the relative importance of an object or behavior, and reward is the pleasurable feelings we derive from that object or behavior. Salience and reward are closely linked in the addicted brain. Addictive substances and behaviors are extremely high in salience to addicts, which means they focus their attention on them. When addicted people engage in addictive behavior, the nucleus accumbens, located deep within the brain, releases a big hit of dopamine, the reward neurotransmitter. Eating a chocolate bar gives you a little squirt of dopamine; eating a hot fudge sundae with cookies ’n’ cream ice cream, whipped cream, sprinkles, and nuts delivers a heftier dose of the neurotransmitter. And taking a drug like heroin causes a huge surge of dopamine. The reward that an addict gets from the dopamine gives that activity great salience, making it their singular focus.

Memory

People who have addictions remember the salience of the activity because the event is registered in both the amygdala and hippocampus. The brain’s emotional center, the amygdala, registers the intense salience and reward and locks it into the memory bank, the hippocampus.

Drive

Drive is what motivates addicts to continue in their behavior. It pushes them to repeat the behavior again and again. Drive originates in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and the anterior cingulate gyrus (ACG), brain regions often associated with working memory. Further research is necessary to determine the degree to which working memory is involved in drive. What happens when an addict craves a drug, is that their OFC and ACG become hyperactive and boost drive intensely. If working memory is involved in drive, it may be like a broken record, replaying the desire to procure the reward, over and over. Indeed, these regions of an addict’s brain resemble those of people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorders.

(Out of) Control

The control aspect in this process is located in the PFC, the home of working memory. For nonaddicts, the PFC helps them resist harmful behavior. For example, when you put your hand over the top of the wine glass rather than accepting another glass, your PFC has been activated to make that decision. But in the addict’s brain, this behavior is reversed: when a person is engaged in the addictive behavior, the PFC is turned down to low. As you would expect, this diminished activity is associated with less self-monitoring and behavioral control. It’s as if the Conductor has left the stage. The salience of how good the addictive substance or activity feels overrides the PFC’s ability to rein in the behavior. When an addicted person craves something, as opposed to being engaged in the behavior or using the substance, the PFC increases in activation. While the person is craving, the PFC recruits working memory to bring up the past memories of the salience and reward, as well as to strategize how to satisfy the urge. In the addicted brain, the working memory Conductor, which should be in control, is under the control of the addiction.

The Addiction Process

In the addicted brain, working memory is recruited as a key component of the addictive process, helping to satisfy the addiction rather than inhibiting it. For illustrative purposes, this image shows the addictive process linearly, though the various stages may not always occur in this sequence.

We got a firsthand glimpse into obsessive behavior when Ross bought a really cool first-person video game about a week before Christmas in 2003. During the day, Ross was a mild-mannered academic, but at night he morphed into an ex–Navy SEAL working in the top-secret Third Echelon subbranch of the National Security Agency. Ross was entrusted with saving the United States from a breakout war with China. He used his stealth and considerable military acumen to stalk enemies and infiltrate their headquarters, even rescuing the United States from the detonation of a nuclear bomb.

You would think Tracy would have been proud of all his hard work and his determination to see the mission through. But in spite of the fact that Ross had single-handedly prevented World War III, she was concerned that he was spending too much time in this fantasy world. He did, after all, skip all of his favorite Christmas activities: going to the German Christmas market in Edinburgh with its steaming mugs of glühwein, hiking in the snow, making Christmas cookies and candy, and caroling on Christmas Eve. The video game had turned Ross into a veritable Christmas Grinch.

For Christmas Day, Tracy banned him from playing. And although Ross found himself moping about and fretting nonstop about what might happen if the game’s shadowy criminal activated the nuclear device while he was celebrating the holiday, he realized that maybe Tracy was right: he had fallen into the grips of video game obsession. He snapped the disc in two and swore off video gaming for good, a pledge yet unbroken.

A lot of gamers are able to moderate the siren call of really awesome video games and do other things aside from assaulting the Sith Lord, winning the Grand Prix, or building a new civilization. But research shows that one in ten video gamers nationwide exhibit signs of addictive behavior. The web is full of stories from gamers who have become obsessed to the detriment of their work and relationships. Consider the following confession posted on a gaming website about addiction to a popular online game:

I had a wife, 3 houses, 3 cars, money in the bank. I stopped working. I went through a divorce. I had to sell a house. I had to sell a car. I have nothing in my bank account now, but good thing my game account is paid in full a year in advance. My credit is in ruins. I don’t care.

Marriages are ruined, children neglected, and financial futures destroyed. The Chinese government’s deep concern about the negative effect of Internet gaming addiction on many of its citizens may have been behind its ban of the popular online game World of Warcraft (WoW) in 2009.

That same year, a group of Taiwanese researchers led by Wei-Chen Lin undertook a groundbreaking study to discover what was happening in the brains of gaming addicts when anticipating a chance to play. They recruited ten heavy users of WoW who had made it to the top levels of the game by regularly playing over thirty hours a week. They also recruited ten nongamers who used the Internet less than two hours a day.

The researchers put them in an fMRI scanner and showed them a series of pictures, alternating between a neutral image and a WoW game image. It is important to note that they did not scan the participants while playing the game. They showed them pictures because they wanted to trigger a craving response in the brain.

As expected, the scans of the nongamer brains showed no difference between WoW images and the neutral images. When the WoW gamers saw the neutral images, their brains looked much like those of the nongamers. But when they saw the game images, the fMRI display screens lit up like a Christmas tree.

The nucleus accumbens activated, anticipating the dopamine hit that came from playing the game—for example, when their character completed a quest, saved a friend, or slew a foe.

The PFC powered up and put working memory to work to figure out how to get that dopamine hit by executing a plan to play the game.

The fact that this study looked at the brain activity when the participants were craving the addictive behavior as opposed to engaging in it explains why the PFC lit up. As we described earlier in the addicted brain model, craving changes the way the PFC and working memory function. The PFC and working memory, which moderate and control behavior in the nonaddicted brain, were in fact recruited in the craving process, enabling it, and finding a way to get that dopamine hit. When it comes to fulfilling a craving for an addictive substance or behavior, working memory becomes an enemy rather than a friend.

When Working Memory Failures Threaten Your Health

Is your working memory also working against you when you want to lose weight but can’t seem to step away from the dessert tray? Do you just lack willpower? Or is something else preventing you from getting control over your eating? Consider Michael, a man from New York who weighed twelve hundred pounds. Partly encouraged by an obese mother, he liked to start the day with four bowls of cereal, toast, waffles, cake, and a quart of soda, and end it with a pizza. Michael tried diet after diet, but he was unable to control his urges.

New science suggests that some of us may in fact be addicted to fat. Considering that two-thirds of U.S. adults are overweight or obese, it is clear that a lot of us are eating more than our fair share of fatty foods, and it is having a devastating impact on our working memory. A 2007 study in the journal Appetite found that obese children perform worse on tests involving working memory compared to their non-obese peers. When you hit middle age, it doesn’t get any better. In 2010, researchers from the University of Texas at Austin found that when obese individuals performed a working memory task, there was less activation in a brain area associated with working memory compared to normal-weight people or those who were just somewhat overweight.

In 2003, scientists at Boston University found that senior citizens who were obese and had hypertension had poorer working memory skills. Other research appearing in Current Alzheimer’s Research in 2007 shows that being obese in midlife is linked to cognitive disease later in life. People who were obese in middle age were five times more likely to be diagnosed with vascular dementia and three times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s. And don’t think you’re off the hook if you’re just a little pudgy rather than outright obese. In this same study, people who were overweight were two times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s or vascular dementia in their not-so-golden years. These studies with humans offer a useful first step in understanding the link between overeating and working memory. More recent research has benefited from using rats in order to more rigorously control experimental conditions—like altering brain cells or introducing electrical shocks—allowing scientists to learn how overeating can be addictive and ultimately impair working memory.

In 2010, neuroscientists Paul Johnson and Paul Kenny of the Scripps Research Institute in Florida set out to understand how fatty foods can act like a drug in the brain to send the reward system spiraling out of control. They took three groups of rats and fed them a variety of diets to see how fatty foods affected their brain and weight. Group 1—we’ll call them the smorgasbord rats—enjoyed nearly unlimited access to high-fat foods, kind of like going to an all-you-can-eat buffet—including some human favorites like bacon, sausage, chocolate, and cheesecake. Group 2—we’ll call them the restrained rats—had access to the same fatty foods but only for a short period once a day. Group 3, a control group—we’ll call them the healthy rats—had access to only healthy rat food. Can you guess what happened? It’s no big surprise that the smorgasbord rats ended up consuming twice as many calories as the healthy rats and quickly grew obese.

The researchers then conditioned the rats: every time a light went on, they would receive a mild electrical shock. The next time the groups went to feed, the researchers turned on the light and waited to see what would happen. The restrained rats and the healthy rats refused to eat when the light was switched on, but the smorgasbord rats went straight for their food. They had become so addicted to the fatty fare that the threat of a mild electrical shock couldn’t deter them from scarfing down every bite.

Johnson and Kenny also wanted to explore more fully the role of dopamine in food addiction. As we’ve said, a person who becomes addicted to a substance tends to need more and more of it to get that same surge of dopamine. That’s because an addicted brain has fewer dopamine receptors to receive the dopamine signals.

Johnson and Kenny wanted to find out what the smorgasbord rats would do if they had fewer dopamine receptors, so they inserted a virus in their brain to attack the receptors. The researchers expected that the rats would gradually adjust and eat less of the fatty food because it didn’t provide the same dopamine high. Imagine their surprise when they found that the rats resorted to eating even more to try to achieve the same high.

So if you’ve ever wondered why it takes three candy bars to get the same satisfaction when it used to take only one, now you know that your brain might be compensating for the declining dopamine receptors. This also helps explain why some of us continue to gorge on fattening foods even though we hate the fact that we can barely zip up our pants, have type 2 diabetes, and are saddled with high blood pressure.

The research on diet and working memory also suggests that overindulgence in fatty foods directly assaults your working memory. Andrew Murray and colleagues at the University of Oxford took two groups of rats. Both were fed a healthy diet for up to two months and were given a working memory test for rats known as a radial maze task. This commonly used task for measuring working memory in rats uses an elevated platform with eight arms that extend from the maze in the center. The rats learn which of the arms have a food reward hidden out of sight at the end of the arm. A working memory error is counted when the rat goes to an arm with no food even though the animal looked there previously. This is considered a working memory task because the rat has to navigate the maze and at the same time hold in mind where it has already been. The researchers noted the scores of the groups.

After this test, they fed one group a high-fat diet for nine days and retested the two groups. The rats on the healthy diet blasted through the maze, and though they weren’t perfect, they scored slightly higher than they did the first time. The rats on the high-fat diet took a lot longer to complete the maze than they did the first time and made more mistakes. The high-fat diet apparently diminished their working memory ability.