Today, peace of mind is a rare commodity. Information overload stresses us as never before, while technology races ahead of us. Yet some people thrive in this environment because they can extract meaning from surrounding confusion and then use it to achieve their goals. These individuals are able to remember, work, think and test better.
Peak Performance and Working Memory
Such individuals are peak performers because of their remarkable working memory capacity. They have developed the ability to draw inferences and to understand the relationships of various concepts, independent of acquired knowledge. They evaluate and place large amounts of data in their working memory, from which they discard what is unimportant, select what is important, and apply it to the task at hand in a creative way. Increased competence and confidence destroys stress. They make good decisions.
They have learned how to cultivate and tap into the full scope of their raw brainpower and you can too.
Working Memory
Working memory has been defined as your ability to hold information in mind while manipulating it to achieve a cognitive goal. There is such a substantial variation in working memory capacity between individuals that working memory capacity accounts for 70% of the differences between us in thought processes.
Whether you are reading, writing, speaking, listening, solving problems, playing an instrument, or just plain thinking, working memory comes into play.
Although central to all human thought processes, your working memory can lose information easily through distraction or overload, and is. Those with poor capacities will struggle to meet the heavy working memory demands of daily living and on the job. Within that struggle lies the stress.
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What Stress Can Do to You and Your Working Memory
Stress Can Break You Down
1. Decision Making
A recent study from Nature Neuroscience has provided evidence that a reduction in the ability to keep a clear distinction between information to be stored in working memory and information that should be ignored and subsequently suppressed, is associated with poor working memory performance. Weak working memory translates to weak decision making. Hence working memory strength and not IQ might be the single most important factor in helping us stay on track with the correct life choices. You cannot afford to ignore your working memory.
2. Poor Recall and Impaired Thinking
Impaired working memory is associated with an elevated level of cortisol. Cortisol is one of the body’s “flight or fight” hormones. When you are scared or stressed your body releases Cortisol into your blood stream. Cortisol causes the cells of your body to release sugar to use as fuel if you need to run, it speeds up your heart rate to get ready to run or fight. It is produced by your adrenal cortex, and Cortisol is a hormone that responds to anxiety by raising blood pressure. It increases blood sugar levels and weakens immune response.
There is a connection between your Cortisol levels and how smart you appear to be. High Cortisol levels are connected with slowed down Working Memory performance and severely impaired recall. Now we know that you can do something about it.
3. Impaired “Happy Chemical” Dopamine System
It is found that chronic stress at high loads impairs your Working Memory. It does so by degrading the responses in your dopamine system. Results indicate that chronic stress induces working memory impairment by influencing an area in your brain called the prefrontal cortex, to generate a reduced response in the dopamine system. This is an area of the brain that you can actually train to make yourself happy, or train to make yourself unhappy. It is your choice.
4. Impairment in Memory of Right Left Direction
Chronic stress induces impairment in your spatial (directional) working memory, because of the prefrontal cortex generating a reduced response in the dopamine system. Research indicates that stress inhibits the ability to remember and navigate.
What to Do About It
Cognitive training can alter the biochemistry of the brain.
Psychologists until recently thought that attributes such as IQ, memory and problem solving were fixed traits of the individual. They were wrong. Strong new science now tells us that your brain has the life long faculty to step up your IQ, boost your focus and memory and give you a sense of well- being. Correct working memory training targets the brain’s built in ability to do that
Through working memory training you can activate the very specific brain function which is key to your every conscious mental process. The bottom line is , you are not stuck with the brain that you were born with.
Quality of Life
Whether we are seniors, students or parents, we want to be smart, have success on exams and generally make high grades in life. We don’t want stress to make us underachieve and we don’t want stress to break us down.
Good working memory training protocol can help you to increase your working memory capacity 50% while increasing fluid intelligence (a composite brain capability involving processing speed, working memory and multi-tasking and higher order processing) by an average of more than 40%.
The Training
You can now access the most sophisticated and effective training protocol available. There are online training modes to ease you through stages of progress and adjust automatically to your growing skills. Your daily progress is graphed and you always know how you are doing. You will be excited at your progress and will want to forge ahead through level after level, but it is better to be patient. Do one day’s exercises and sleep on it. Consolidation of the gains that you have made takes place while you sleep. If you miss a day, don’t worry. Just pick up where you left off. The more you train the more you gain. And as the progressive training continues the gains continue.
At the recent 25th annual meeting of the American Academy of Pain Medicine, the keynote speaker Dr. Norman Doidge presented an overview of “brain plasticity”, the newly understood capacity we have to change our own brains for the better. He called this new understanding of our innate capacity to change our own brains as “the most important medical advance in 400 years”.
