Bashny.Net
Working memory: how ignoring unimportant improves brain function
Bashny.Net
Do you often get distracted from the main task in the extraneous information that have no special significance? If so, should warn you: the amount of working memory isn't infinite, therefore, distracted by the small stuff, you are wasting precious resources of your brain.
Psychologist and prepodavatel Julia Shaw wrote about this issue a short article for Scientific American in which he described the functioning of working memory, what role does it play in the work of our brain and how the volume of working memory depends on the ability to ignore the unimportant.
If I call out loud a random set of numbers, for example, 1593657292759381380473 how you think, how many of these digits you can remember?
The magic number
Some scientists argue that we are able to memorize about seven digits. More precisely, since in the 1950s there was an article called "the Magical number seven, plus or minus two", many have suggested that the volume of working memory typically includes five to nine things, although some scholars argue that the number is actually closer to four.
When I say "things", I mean the blocks or pieces of information. If to speak about the above mentioned number, you could, for example, memorize 1, 5, 9, 3. In this case, each individual digit is considered a single entity. However, you can memorize more numbers if you arrange a set of numbers in another way: as 15, 93, 65, 72. In each case you're dealing with four pieces of information, only in a different combination.
From this it follows that when scientists say about our ability to keep a certain number of items in working memory, these individual elements can be of different size, complexity and importance. In any case, working memory is small, but very important.
Working memory
What is working memory? Working memory is the "control panel" of your brain. This is the place where you can put information on the time, while your brain makes a decision about whether or not this information in order to put in the effort and to place it permanently in your long term memory.
As it turns out, for different sensations and feelings are given different capacity in the control panel. This means that the volume of what you can remember depends, for example, told you some information or show. For this reason, it is important to consider different types of working memory separately.
To complete all the necessary material, people have different capacities to hold things in working memory. These individual differences in working memory capacity are important because they, as scientists have found, greatly affect things like intelligence: in General, the greater the volume of working memory is equal to the greater mind.
But why are some people able to hold more in their working memory than others?
Ignoring the nonsense (pay No attention to the little things)
Fortunately for us, a new study of a group of scientists from the University of Simon Fraser sheds light on why some people are able to hold more things in the dashboards of their brain than others.
The research team led by Professor of psychology John MacDonald and doctoral student John Gaspar learned the differences in the visual memory by recording brain waves of people watching and things to which they paid attention.
If you have a question, why are we talking about attention, let me remind you that attention and memory are inextricably linked. Paying attention to the object, how would you increase it in your brain, making it easier to remember.
But to make something easier to remember – this is only one aspect of attention. Focusing attention on something also means that you ignore all distracting information from the outside world. It is a feature on which people differ significantly from each other.
In the study people, of which working memory was weak, could not suppress distracting information. According to John Gaspar, this suggests that it is not in the amount of relevant information as you can remember but how well you ignore irrelevant information.
These data positively correlated with the previous studies scientists demonstrated that the human brain uses different processes to focus attention on important information and suppress irrelevant information.
Also interesting: How our brain memory
How to IMPROVE MEMORY without medication
These are objective data. And the problem is not only how much information we can simultaneously hold in our memory, and how much information we can keep out of it.
So next time when you find that you find it difficult to remember a phone number or an image, just chalk it to your scatter brain.published
P. S. And remember, just changing your mind — together we change the world! ©
Source: monocler.ru/obem-rabochey-pamyati/
Psychologist and prepodavatel Julia Shaw wrote about this issue a short article for Scientific American in which he described the functioning of working memory, what role does it play in the work of our brain and how the volume of working memory depends on the ability to ignore the unimportant.
If I call out loud a random set of numbers, for example, 1593657292759381380473 how you think, how many of these digits you can remember?
The magic number
Some scientists argue that we are able to memorize about seven digits. More precisely, since in the 1950s there was an article called "the Magical number seven, plus or minus two", many have suggested that the volume of working memory typically includes five to nine things, although some scholars argue that the number is actually closer to four.
When I say "things", I mean the blocks or pieces of information. If to speak about the above mentioned number, you could, for example, memorize 1, 5, 9, 3. In this case, each individual digit is considered a single entity. However, you can memorize more numbers if you arrange a set of numbers in another way: as 15, 93, 65, 72. In each case you're dealing with four pieces of information, only in a different combination.
From this it follows that when scientists say about our ability to keep a certain number of items in working memory, these individual elements can be of different size, complexity and importance. In any case, working memory is small, but very important.
Working memory
What is working memory? Working memory is the "control panel" of your brain. This is the place where you can put information on the time, while your brain makes a decision about whether or not this information in order to put in the effort and to place it permanently in your long term memory.
As it turns out, for different sensations and feelings are given different capacity in the control panel. This means that the volume of what you can remember depends, for example, told you some information or show. For this reason, it is important to consider different types of working memory separately.
To complete all the necessary material, people have different capacities to hold things in working memory. These individual differences in working memory capacity are important because they, as scientists have found, greatly affect things like intelligence: in General, the greater the volume of working memory is equal to the greater mind.
But why are some people able to hold more in their working memory than others?
Ignoring the nonsense (pay No attention to the little things)
Fortunately for us, a new study of a group of scientists from the University of Simon Fraser sheds light on why some people are able to hold more things in the dashboards of their brain than others.
The research team led by Professor of psychology John MacDonald and doctoral student John Gaspar learned the differences in the visual memory by recording brain waves of people watching and things to which they paid attention.
If you have a question, why are we talking about attention, let me remind you that attention and memory are inextricably linked. Paying attention to the object, how would you increase it in your brain, making it easier to remember.
But to make something easier to remember – this is only one aspect of attention. Focusing attention on something also means that you ignore all distracting information from the outside world. It is a feature on which people differ significantly from each other.
In the study people, of which working memory was weak, could not suppress distracting information. According to John Gaspar, this suggests that it is not in the amount of relevant information as you can remember but how well you ignore irrelevant information.
These data positively correlated with the previous studies scientists demonstrated that the human brain uses different processes to focus attention on important information and suppress irrelevant information.
Also interesting: How our brain memory
How to IMPROVE MEMORY without medication
These are objective data. And the problem is not only how much information we can simultaneously hold in our memory, and how much information we can keep out of it.
So next time when you find that you find it difficult to remember a phone number or an image, just chalk it to your scatter brain.published
P. S. And remember, just changing your mind — together we change the world! ©
Source: monocler.ru/obem-rabochey-pamyati/
Tags
See also
Magnetic field improves memory
15 secrets to stimulate the brain
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore: the mysterious workings of the adolescent brain
60 tips to improve the functioning of the brain:
12 easy ways to stimulate the brain as much as possible.
Cerebration
ways to improve memory
9 obvious ways to help the brain. You'll be surprised by their ingenuity!
15 effective ways to concentrate on the job
