We have tracked for sev­er­al years the sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies pub­lished by Torkel Kling­berg and col­leagues, often won­der­ing aloud, “when will edu­ca­tors, health pro­fes­sion­als, exec­u­tives and main­stream soci­ety come to appre­ci­ate the poten­tial we have in front of us to enhance our brains and improve our cog­ni­tive func­tions?”

Dr. Kling­berg has just pub­lished a very stim­u­lat­ing pop­u­lar sci­ence book, The Over­flow­ing Brain , that should help in pre­cise­ly that direc­tion. Giv­en the impor­tance of the top­ic, and the qual­i­ty of the book, we have named The Over­flow­ing Brain: Infor­ma­tion Over­load and the Lim­its of Work­ing Mem­o­ry The Sharp­Brains Most Impor­tant Book of 2008, and asked Dr. Kling­berg to write a brief arti­cle to intro­duce his research and book to you. Below you have. Enjoy!

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Research and Tools to Thrive in the Cog­ni­tive Age

By Dr. Torkel Kling­berg

Do we all have atten­tion deficits?

The infor­ma­tion age has pro­vid­ed us with high tech­nol­o­gy which fills our days with an ever increas­ing amount of infor­ma­tion and dis­trac­tion. We are con­stant­ly flood­ed with on-the-go emails, phone calls, adver­tise­ments and text-mes­sages and we try to cope with the increas­ing pace by mul­ti task­ing. A sur­vey of work­places in the Unit­ed States found that the per­son­nel were inter­rupt­ed and dis­tract­ed rough­ly every three min­utes and that peo­ple work­ing on a com­put­er had on aver­age eight win­dows open at the same time. There is no ten­den­cy for this to slow down; the amount and com­plex­i­ty of infor­ma­tion con­tin­u­al­ly increas­es

The most press­ing con­cerns with this envi­ron­ment are: how do we deal with the dai­ly influx of infor­ma­tion that our inun­dat­ed men­tal capac­i­ties are faced with? At what point does our stone-age brain become insuf­fi­cient? Will we be able to train our brains effec­tive­ly to increase brain capac­i­ty in order to stay in-step with our inex­orable lifestyles? Or will we be strick­en with atten­tion deficits because of brain over­load?

In his arti­cle “Over­loaded Cir­cuits: Why Smart Peo­ple Under­per­form, psy­chi­a­trist Edward Hal­low­ell coins the term “atten­tion deficit trait” to char­ac­ter­ize the sit­u­a­tion in which so many of us find our­selves. This is not a new diag­no­sis of any use to doc­tors, but rather a descrip­tion of the men­tal state that infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy, a faster pace, and chang­ing work pat­terns have induced. Some would call it a lifestyle.

The point of Hal­low­ell’s term is that it illus­trates how the mod­ern work sit­u­a­tion, with its pace and simul­ta­ne­ous demands, often gives us the feel­ing of hav­ing atten­tion dif­fi­cul­ties and of not quite hav­ing the capac­i­ty to do our jobs. Our brains are being flood­ed. But is it real­ly the case that the infor­ma­tion soci­ety gen­er­al­ly impairs peo­ples’ atten­tion­al abil­i­ties? What are atten­tion­al abil­i­ties, any­way, and exact­ly what in our com­plex work sit­u­a­tions is men­tal­ly demand­ing?

Cog­ni­tive Demands in the Infor­ma­tion Age

In my book “ The Over­flow­ing Brain: Infor­ma­tion Over­load and the Lim­its of Work­ing Mem­o­ry I try to pin­point the nature of the cog­ni­tive demands of mod­ern life and the psy­cho­log­i­cal and neur­al basis of our capac­i­ty lim­i­ta­tions. One demand fac­tor in our work­ing lives is the inces­sant dis­trac­tions: all the impres­sions that buzz around us like mos­qui­toes and make it hard for us to con­cen­trate on what we’re doing. The tor­rent of infor­ma­tion increas­es not only the vol­ume of data we’re expect­ed to take in but also the vol­ume we need to shut out.

Anoth­er impor­tant demand fac­tor is mul­ti­task­ing, which is the quick and easy solu­tion for all those who want to get more done in less time. How­ev­er, doing (or at least try­ing to do) sev­er­al tasks simul­ta­ne­ous­ly is one of our most demand­ing every­day activ­i­ties. Run­ning on a tread­mill while watch­ing TV usu­al­ly isn’t too tax­ing, nor is chew­ing gum while walk­ing in a straight line. But even such a mun­dane sit­u­a­tion as talk­ing on a cell phone while dri­ving is not as easy as we’d like to think. Apart from the fact that its dif­fi­cult to hold the wheel and shift gears with the same hand, or to keep our eyes on the road and on the phone’s dis­play at the same time, there’s some­thing in the men­tal­ly demand­ing task of tele­phon­ing that makes us worse dri­vers.

Infor­ma­tion over­load, dis­trac­tions and mul­ti­task­ing are prob­a­bly the most impor­tant fac­tors in mak­ing the infor­ma­tion age so cog­ni­tive­ly demand­ing are.

The Role of Work­ing Mem­o­ry: chal­lenges and oppor­tu­ni­ties

There are plen­ty of indi­ca­tions that those three fac­tors are load­ing on our work­ing mem­o­ry capac­i­ty, which is our capac­i­ty to hold on to rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion for short peri­ods of time. The prob­lem is that our work­ing mem­o­ry capac­i­ty is a scarce resource. The increase in infor­ma­tion load thus meets a bio­log­i­cal con­straint in how much we can han­dle. A ques­tion that has always fas­ci­nat­ed me is how this capac­i­ty con­straint is wired in our brain, and if we can in some way increase this capac­i­ty, and this ques­tion is a thread that I fol­low through­out the book.

In the research that my col­leagues and I have done at the Karolin­s­ka Insti­tute in Stock­holm, we have shown that train­ing on work­ing mem­o­ry tasks, close or above the lim­it of our capac­i­ty, can improve our work­ing mem­o­ry. This improve­ment is not only con­fined to the trained tasks, but gen­er­al­izes to oth­er cog­ni­tive tasks requir­ing work­ing mem­o­ry and con­trol of atten­tion. We have also shown that this train­ing improves the abil­i­ty to focus in every­day life. The work­ing mem­o­ry capac­i­ty lim­i­ta­tion is not immutable, but actu­al­ly pos­si­ble to stretch.

Fur­ther­more, it is pos­si­ble that the increas­ing infor­ma­tion load not only is harm­less, but might actu­al­ly improve our cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties through improve­ment of work­ing mem­o­ry. The now well known Fly­nn effect tells us that flu­id intel­li­gence is increas­ing, pre­sum­ably due to envi­ron­men­tal demands on cog­ni­tion. The most impor­tant cog­ni­tive demands of mod­ern life relates to work­ing mem­o­ry, and the most impor­tant cog­ni­tive func­tion under­ly­ing flu­id intel­li­gence is work­ing mem­o­ry capac­i­ty. The way envi­ron­men­tal demands improves flu­id intel­li­gence might thus be through improve­ment on work­ing mem­o­ry capac­i­ty.

In oth­er words, mod­ern life itself may help make us more cog­ni­tive­ly able. And emerg­ing tools may enhance our abil­i­ties and bet­ter pre­pare us for the demands of the Infor­ma­tion Age.

Reflec­tions for the Future

Train­ing our brains might thus be a way to keep up with the increas­ing demands of the infor­ma­tion age. This might be espe­cial­ly rel­e­vant for those of us that are over 25 years of age, when work­ing mem­o­ry capac­i­ty starts to decline year by year, at the same time as the demands increase. In my book I, half jok­ing­ly, sug­gest­ed that in the future we might see com­pa­ny-fund­ed cog­ni­tive fit­ness train­ing for employ­ees. It was with a cer­tain sat­is­fac­tion that I recent­ly read in Sharp­Brains blog about a new ini­tia­tive by the USA Ice Hock­ey league to pro­vide com­put­er­ized cog­ni­tive train­ing ‑focused on impor­tant per­cep­tion and deci­sion-mak­ing skills- to its play­ers.

In the future we might be as aware of cog­ni­tive func­tion as we know are obsessed with calo­ries, diets, glycemic index and car­dio­vas­cu­lar train­ing, and brain train­ing might be a part of our every day life.