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.

– Dr. Torkel Kling­berg leads the Devel­op­men­tal Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science Lab at the Karolin­ska Insti­tute, which is part of the Stock­holm Brain Insti­tute. He has recently writ­ten The Over­flow­ing Brain: Infor­ma­tion Over­load and the Lim­its of Work­ing Mem­ory (Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, Novem­ber 2008).

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