If you want
to upgrade your brain like Eddie Mora from Limitless, then unfortunately you
won’t find it to be as easy as taking a single pill. Instead, you’re going to
have to look at more arduous and lengthy strategies, including such things as
brain training or improving your overall health.
If you
choose to go the brain-training route though, there is one especially effective
and ‘easy’ method that you may find helps you to see the kinds of results you’re
looking for. That method is to focus your training on working memory. But what
does that actually mean?
What is Working Memory?
The
traditional view of memory split out capacity for storing information into
three separate categories. Those were: working memory, short-term memory and
long-term memory.
Short-term
memory was described as containing all the information that you remember for a
while, but that would ultimately be ‘sent to trash’. This includes such things
as people’s names, or what you had for breakfast. Long-term memory meanwhile
includes all that information that you will remember indefinitely: the names of
your friends, the night you proposed, how to tell the time etc.
Working
memory, based on this description, was effectively your brain’s equivalent of
RAM. This is where information would be stored that would only be required for
a very short amount of time. The most popular example is a phone number that
you are going to write down.
In turn,
the working memory – based on the traditional view – could be broken down into
a ‘visuo-spatial scratchpad’ where we would visualize things and a
‘phonological loop’ where we would repeat things to ourselves in a bid to not
forget them.
Today
though, psychologists are recognizing that working memory has much more
in-common with visualization in general. This is our ability to internalize
information, whether that’s memory, imagination or something else.
In short,
this is our ability to create a representation of the world whether for
predictive purposes or something else. In conversation, this means keeping
track of what’s been said and what’s next. In sports, it means knowing where
everyone is on the pitch. When working, it’s what allows us to multitask and
switch between different things. This is nothing short of crucial for your ability to work quickly and effectively.
How to Train It
The good
news is that there is a proven method for increasing working memory and that is
to train using something called the N Back test. Use this and you can gradually
improve your ability to hold information in your mind with incredible results.
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