When reading a paper book quietly, it is easy for you to enter a state of concentration, but when reading an article online, it is easy to be disturbed by dynamic small advertisements around the article.
The huge flood of information in life also brings a lot of interference and noise to daily work and life. Will you find that your brain seems to be insufficient at some point?
Is this a problem, what does it mean and how to deal with it?
"Overloaded Brain" reveals the veil of overloaded brain step by step by exploring a series of cutting-edge sciences.
The author of this book, Professor Klingberg, is an active academic leader. He works in the famous karolinska institutet in Sweden and is also a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Royal Swedish Academy, a Nobel Prize-winning institution.
His main research direction is children's memory training, and his research proves that working memory ability can be improved through training.
Outside the academic field, he founded a biotechnology company and developed a software program to train working memory, which received enthusiastic response from the market. Chuan Dao Longtai, a classmate, helped Nintendo develop the "Brain Platinum" series of games which are popular all over the world.
The Overloaded Brain has been published for ten years, and it has been well received. It is a masterpiece of popular science in brain research.
The overload is increasing.
Think of the brain as a high-speed machine, constantly processing perceptual information. Does overload mean that the machine is out of order?
Nicholas Carr predicted in the best-selling book Shallow that in the process of enjoying the generosity of the Internet, both human individuals and society are regressing.
But the author Klingberg brought good news.
In the first 10 years of the 20th century, when psychological tests were conducted on a large number of people, scholars found that the performance in each test was positively correlated. It means that those who perform above average in one test tend to perform above average in other tests, which means that there is one factor that can determine the performance in all tests.
The theory put forward by American psychologists Carter and Horn was one of the most influential keys at that time. Suppose this factor can be found by statistical means and named as universal factor, which is IQ.
Professor James Flynn, a New Zealand scholar, pointed out in the journal Nature (1982) that American intelligence tests are getting better and better. This phenomenon is long-term and obvious, and also exists in many developed countries.
He consulted more than 70 studies, including the data of more than 7,500 testers from 1932 to 1987, and found that the average IQ increased by three points every 10 year, which is about 3%. This means that if you send an average score of 1990 to 60 years ago, the score will rank in the top 6% and suddenly jump from the middle to the top 5.
Nowadays, most psychologists believe that the improvement of test scores is a true reflection of people becoming smarter. Muscle will become stronger if you engage in high-intensity labor for a long time, and may become stronger if you are under information pressure for a long time.
Since intelligence is constantly improving, the performance of brain-computer is rising instead of falling, why do you still think that the brain is not enough? Further research found that this is related to the difference in demand and ability.
The huge amount of information adds a lot of extra requirements. Compared with three years ago, the ability to delete emails while calling may have improved by 10%, but the number of emails you receive every day may have increased by 200%.
If you look at the feelings of the general public, you will find that it is not that people's ability has weakened. There is no contradiction between your lack of ability and the substantial improvement of these abilities. Perception is only a relative defect.
It's not that there is something wrong with the brain, but that the opponent is too fierce, and with the continuous acceleration of society, the flood of information is rolling in and the overload is getting bigger and bigger.
Break through the attention bottleneck
You can't just sit back and wait, but you have to meet this flood of information.
Simon, the academic leader of the cognitive revolution, has a famous saying: "The great wealth of information means the extreme scarcity of attention", and the overflow of information is accompanied by the scarcity of attention.
The author turned his attention to the study of attention, and first looked at the frontier research of attention.
If the surrounding environment is a map, then attention is like a light beam illuminating the characteristic areas on the map. Attention is not only what you notice, but also what is inside.
Colbert and Schulman of the University of Washington divide attention into two categories: one is stimulus response attention. What new discoveries are there around you, particularly novel things that make you involuntarily attracted.
The other is to control your attention, which is controlled by you. For example, you have an exam tomorrow, and you consciously look at the comparison. This is attention control. But when you think about your girlfriend, you are distracted, and your controlled attention is out of control.
The two kinds of attention are wrestling with each other, and the stimulus response is increasing, so it is necessary to control the confrontation between them. It is working memory that determines the ability to control attention.
Crayton Curtis and Mark Despoto of the University of California, Berkeley designed a psychological experiment to test the working memory of 15 subjects. At the same time, they kept scanning their brains. After the experiment, the two researchers analyzed more than 40,000 brain images collected by the scanner and found the brain region of working memory.
Compared with Corbetta and Schulman's research on attention, they came to a surprising conclusion: the brain regions of working memory and attention overlap each other.
Working memory refers to a brain system that can provide temporary storage and operation for necessary information in complex cognitive tasks such as language understanding, learning and reasoning. Working memory can be used to control attention, remember instructions, store work plans in your mind, and solve complex problems.
It's easy to understand. When you switch between two tasks, you have to switch the instructions needed for two tasks in your brain at the same time, so the amount of information in your brain is twice as much as when you only store one set of instructions. Only if you have a strong ability to temporarily store information, can you bear double the workload.
When you perform a task in a noisy office, only a stable ability to temporarily store information can ensure that your attention is not distracted, otherwise you will easily lose the information stored in your mind and completely forget what you wanted to do before.
There are bottlenecks in working memory. The discovery of 7 2 short-term memory capacity, the landmark event of 1956 cognitive revolution, shows that the bandwidth of human short-term memory is very narrow. At the beginning of 2 1 century, the threshold was further revised downward by cognitive psychology, and the new threshold recognized by mainstream literature was reduced to 4.
Working memory is the key to solve the information flooding. The author is an expert in working memory, and this book will also enter the key part.
The mystery of working memory
Working memory is a pioneering concept put forward by top neuroscientists.
This research originated from Atkinson and Schifflin, and promoted the process of human memory, from input to perceptual memory → working memory → long-term memory. Among them, perceptual memory can be understood as the information received by human visual, auditory and tactile sensory systems. It is transmitted to working memory through the human nervous system, and after corresponding processing, it will be transferred to the hard disk in the human brain (long-term memory). Of course, working memory can also read information directly from the hard disk.
It is named working memory because it includes not only short-term memory information, but also information processing system. This is the bottleneck of memory and the breakthrough of memory research. This model compares human memory with computer storage, and the limitation of magic number comes from capacity. But it also brings another hypothesis, that is, the intensity of memory depends on the frequency of reading and writing, and the more times you remember, the better, but this is not realistic.
Baddeley, from Oxford University, has made a breakthrough in his work. He is responsible for the design of postal codes. As for the postal code, China is composed of pure numbers, while Britain is in the form of "English+Numbers". Baddeley found that the structure of "English+numbers" is easier to remember than pure numbers, because it is a meaningful string, and there are other ways to change the memory strength besides the number of times.
What is the essence of working memory? The breakthrough is language. In addition to being a medium of communication, language can also be used as a carrier for the brain to store and process information. Baddeley suggested that the brain uses a "phonetic cycle": reading numbers or words silently can keep information for a few seconds while the brain is listening.
By using language fragments to help you describe things, you can temporarily store the results of psychological operations and extract a lot of information stored in language expressions. Psychological operation will involve many numbers, such as extracting the nonverbal formula "7×8=56".
Working memory is more than just language. In the experiment, the subjects were asked to remember something in a short time, such as word pronunciation, while performing a different and more complicated task, such as visual picture task. According to the original memory theory, because they are not the same thing, they should interact with each other, constrained by the "magic number 7" criterion of the number of human brain information processing tasks, that is, the human brain can only process 7 2 information chunks at the same time.
The final experimental results show that there is no interaction between the voice task and the simultaneous picture task. When the voice task is blocked, the visual short-term memory is not affected and can still be stored normally. or vice versa, Dallas to the auditorium Experiments show that in the short-term memory of human brain, speech information processing is an independent system, and vision is similar to a parallel system, and the two do not interfere with each other. This is what psychology now calls the "double separation of memory" mechanism.
In 2000, the model was upgraded. Baddeley pointed out in an article that the original working memory model lacked a system that could integrate phonetic information and visual space information, which he called "situational buffer". This system will do some mixing operations, that is, mix the information between pure voice, pure vision, voice and vision.
"Situational buffer" reflects people's consciousness. Although the human brain can retain memory information, it must be displayed in some way, and this way is in the "scene buffer". It can even be said that "scene buffer" is where people's consciousness lies.
With the deepening of research, it is gradually found that working memory is not an inanimate mechanical body, but a growing living body.
A channel for spiritual improvement.
In terms of reshaping the brain, deutsch said that in recent years, scientists have found that children are not locked in by their mental abilities at birth, and damaged brains can often reorganize their functions.
If some cells in the brain die, after a period of time, the functions of these cells can be replaced, many circuits that are considered to be fixed, and even basic reflex reactions can be changed.
The research conclusion that the brain can be changed when it grows is very exciting, which overturns the dogma that the brain cannot be changed. This can be regarded as the most amazing discovery of the 20th century.
How to make use of the discovery of plasticity, the author Klingberg listed some operable methods.
There are two directions. The first is neurocognitive reinforcement. This is an outside-in approach. Through the interaction between human brain and computer, neurosurgery and psychopharmacology, the potential of brain can be developed.
In a survey conducted by Nature in 2008, it was found that as many as 20% of the respondents said that they had taken ritalin to enhance their cognitive ability. Although it looks amazing, it is a psychotropic drug after all, and the possibility of brain damage and drug resistance still exists. If users want to quit after addiction, it will also be very painful.
Therefore, in order to prevent abuse, the Japanese government banned the over-the-counter use of ritalin nationwide. In Chinese mainland, at present, this medicine can only be obtained by writing prescriptions by doctors in regular big hospitals.
Ritalin is only the first such drug on the market. By the time the author wrote this book, about 40 substances had been developed one after another.
Although the author did not show strong criticism on these drugs, he advocated another direction: mental exercise. Mental exercise is a change from the outside to the inside.
The easiest ways to exercise working memory are reading, playing chess, playing musical instruments and dancing. Joe Wegerdt of Einstein Medical College observed more than 400 elderly people for five years, and found that if you can do the above activities more than eight times a week, the risk of Alzheimer's Harmo's disease will be reduced by half.
This is actually obvious, because playing chess requires high working memory and attention control. Figuring out the next few moves in advance may be one of the daily activities with the highest working memory load for ordinary people.
Similarly, there is reading. Obviously, the more complicated the text, the better the effect will be. The author points out that people can take the initiative to try to enter unfamiliar fields and read a lot of professional articles on terminology in this field, which requires a lot of vocabulary energy.
Of course, reading obscure professional articles is indeed an arduous challenge, and not everyone can persist. Therefore, the author also suggests that you read cooking books and try to see if you can input all the cooking steps into your working memory at one time until you finish cooking. This is undoubtedly a more interesting way of mental exercise.
But it must be clear that if you want to train effectively, you must achieve sufficient training frequency and intensity. Playing chess once a week will not have any effect.
Besides playing chess, meditation is another effective way to exercise working memory. When practicing meditation, you should sit quietly with your eyes half closed and concentrate on your posture and breathing. You don't need to read any scriptures, and you don't need to fantasize about any specific images in your mind. All you have to do is count your breaths, count every breath until you count to ten, and then start from the beginning.
The function of counting is to let you know when your mind is wandering. If you forget to count, or suddenly find that you have counted to sixteen, you will realize that your attention is distracted.
If we start with improving memory executive function, some people think that meditation and meditation are also possible ways to improve it, because memory executive function will include the ability of will. Although it seems that there is a distance between memory and things, working memory is not just a memory. As long as it is trained and related to working memory, it may be helpful to working memory.
The higher the intensity of exercise, the better. There may not be an optimal exercise load, which is called flow.
When the challenge exceeds the ability and the ability to feel pressure exceeds the challenge, the sense of control arises. As the degree of challenge decreases, things become boring. Only when ability and challenge are in balance can flow be guided. Perhaps only by entering the deep state can we give full play to our abilities and maximize our potential.
Through the strengthening of neurocognition and mental exercise, through the discovery of flow, we can establish a channel to improve our minds, and also give everyone a weapon to meet the flood of information.
End of movement
150 years ago, Wallace, one of the discoverers of evolution, put forward a mystery about the development of the human brain. Why did evolution give early humans so much intellectual space? The brains of modern people are no different from those of farmers in Kroma 40,000 years ago. It is very unreasonable for human beings to have such a huge brain. Because the principle of evolution is that the degree of organization will only meet the actual needs of each species and will never exceed one point.
After a hundred years, it seems that it is getting closer and closer to answering Wallace's problem. Those situations that challenge the limits of ability have the greatest effect on brain training. This is the strict requirement and increasing complexity of physical and mental intelligence in life, which makes the ability to process information and solve problems gradually stronger.
Nature has endowed this magical brain, which can continue to make progress and tap more energy in the era of overload.
For thousands of years, people have been facing the problem that the brain is not enough, but it is more and more enough. We must face up to our desire for information, stimulation and spiritual challenges, find the optimal balance between cognition and our own abilities, and maximize the development of our brain abilities.
The introduction of "Brain Overload" came to an end, and finally concluded:
In this book, author Klineberry puts forward the key to working memory from the dilemma of information overload and attention deficit through neuroscience research.
The book reveals the mystery of working memory, refines a series of operable promotion strategies and finally points to the ultimate mystery of the brain.
Wise people feel great about the ordinary, and the brain is a natural power. How to use it is worth thinking about.