ignore-distractions

Karolin­s­ka Insti­tute’s Dr. Torkel Kling­berg has just released in the US his excel­lent book The Over­flow­ing Brain: Infor­ma­tion Over­load and the Lim­its of Work­ing Mem­o­ry

The title was first released in Swe­den with great suc­cess, and our co-founder Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg gave a Fore­word to the new US edition.

Dr. Kling­berg will be writ­ing an essay for Sharp­Brains read­ers soon, so we can dis­cuss the impor­tance of this top­ic and his work in depth. Let me now link to two thought-pro­vok­ing reviews of the book:

Atten­tion Must Be Paid (Inside High­er Ed)

- “The weak link in the infor­ma­tion age seems to be our human hard-wiring. So one gath­ers from The Over­flow­ing Brain: Infor­ma­tion Over­load and the Lim­its of Work­ing Mem­o­ry (Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press) by Torkel Kling­berg, who is a pro­fes­sor of devel­op­men­tal cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science at the Stock­holm Brain Insti­tute. A review of recent research on how atten­tion and mem­o­ry actu­al­ly func­tion with­in our gray mat­ter, it is a work of sci­en­tif­ic pop­u­lar­iza­tion rather than a hand­book on how to min­i­mize the cog­ni­tive drain of distraction.”

- “To sim­pli­fy Kling­berg’s already pared-down analy­sis, we can dis­tin­guish between two kinds of atten­tion. One is con­trolled atten­tion: the direct­ed effort to apply ones con­cen­tra­tion to a par­tic­u­lar task. The oth­er is stim­u­lus-dri­ven atten­tion, which is an invol­un­tary response to some­thing hap­pen­ing in the envi­ron­ment. (You can tune out the con­ver­sa­tions going on around you in a restau­rant. But if a wait­er drops a tray full of dish­es, it is going to impose itself on your awareness.)”

- “Kling­berg reports that a two-year study in his lab showed that it was pos­si­ble to increase work­ing-mem­o­ry capac­i­ty [Read more…] about Torkel Kling­berg helps with Over­flow­ing Brain & Infor­ma­tion Overload