When we were dealing with a lot of mail in the office, suddenly the customer connected. When you put down the phone, you may forget what to do in an instant.

The boss gives you several big tasks. If you don't coordinate well, you are likely to be in a hurry and appear to have insufficient brains.

When we are busy with work, we often feel overwhelmed and our memory becomes poor. We may leave home and forget whether to close the door or not.

……

Psychological research shows that our ability to coordinate multiple tasks and eliminate information interference are all related to the same core ability, that is, the brain's ability to temporarily store information.

For example, if you are performing 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.

Psychologists call the brain's ability to temporarily store information "working memory". Simply put, it is the ability of people to remember information in a limited time, usually only a few seconds.

Capacity limitation of working memory is an important feature different from long-term memory. Theoretically, the amount of information that long-term memory can store is almost infinite. As long as one thing enters your long-term memory, even after several years, you can easily recall it. However, working memory needs to be closely monitored at all times. Once your attention turns elsewhere, the contents stored in working memory will soon be lost.

In the book Overloaded Brain, the author Professor Tok Klingberg designed a psychological experiment:

Let the subjects perform a task that requires visual working memory, then perform a task that requires auditory working memory, and finally perform these two tasks at the same time. At the same time as the test, he also used a magnetic vibration scanner to observe the brain activity of the subjects.

This experiment shows that this overlapping phenomenon in the brain is the bottleneck of our information processing ability.

In the book Overloaded Brain, the author points out that we must have a correct understanding of the work of "training the brain".

If you practice distinguishing sound levels, you will only exercise the auditory cortex of the brain; If you practice juggling and throwing the ball, only the motor cortex will get exercise. If you want to improve your brain power in logical thinking, reading comprehension and other aspects, rather than the proficiency of a certain skill, then what you need to exercise is your working memory ability.

Professor Tok Klingberg provides three simple and feasible methods for ordinary people:

The first feasible method is 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.

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.

The second feasible method is meditation.

In 2007, Brevchinsky Lewis and Richard Davison used a magnetic vibration scanner to detect the brain activity of Buddhist monks, and found that in the experiment of testing attention, some brain regions of monks showed more intense activity, which happened to be brain regions related to working memory.

The third feasible method is computer games.

Of course, there are gains and losses. For a teenager who is still a student, spending too much time playing games will inevitably lead to insufficient time to study homework. Therefore, the key question is whether the time schedule is reasonable, not the computer game itself.

However, not all games have a significant effect on improving working memory. For example, a study mentioned in the book proves that Tetris can only improve players' ability to solve spatial vision problems, and there is no evidence that it will improve working memory. So if you want to improve your brain power through games, it is very important to choose the right games.