an interview for your dream sales job, and you are totally prepared for it—you’ve researched the firm, its clients, its competition, and its sales strategies. But the interviewer throws you for a loop with a wacky question out of the middle of nowhere: “You’re meeting a client in an industrial estate with a gated parking lot. Where do you park?” “Huh?” You hesitate, then your working memory digs into your recent memory vault to recall that the interviewer had pointed to her car—backed into the parking space next to the exit gate—during your interview, and you quickly figure that where she parks is where she would want you to park, so you say, “I’d park right next to the exit.” Ding, ding, ding! You get the job.
Take Smarter Risks
Your Conductor helps you zero in on the most essential information when weighing the pros and cons of any potentially risky venture and helps keep you from blindly going with the flow or following the crowd. For example, when that Facebook initial public offering you invested in takes an immediate nosedive, it’s your working memory that helps you decide whether to dump your stock or hold on to it.
Learn More Easily in School
Kids use their Conductor every time they set foot in the classroom. It helps them to inhibit distracting information—like their classmates whispering near them—and to keep track of where they are in multistep tasks. It also allows them to access all the information they need, such as numbers or words, to complete an assignment. And, it lets them hold that information in mind and complete the tasks as quickly as possible.
Make Judgment Calls
Making quick decisions about your likes and dislikes, as well as how to act in certain situations, is a working-memory-intensive task. It may come as a surprise that even judging attractiveness relies heavily on working memory. When you spot someone across a bar, your working memory riffles through your hippocampus Rolodex for previous references of beautiful people. Then your working memory allows you to hold this information in mind while you compare the new person with the mental image and make a decision: Hot or not? The same process occurs as you decide whether you like a horror movie. Does the monster on screen measure up to the others stored in your hippocampus?
As far as actions go, your working memory is in control. If you get into a car accident and the other driver jumps out of his car and starts coming toward you in an aggressive manner, your working memory helps you quickly run through various scenarios to determine whether it’s better for you to get out of the car or lock your door and call 911.
Adapt to New Situations
Have you ever wondered why some people who get laid off, divorced, or move across the country for a job transfer manage to land on their feet and thrive while others struggle to find their way? A strong working memory is the key to being able to switch gears and reinvent your career, jump back into the dating pool after years of marriage, or create a new life in a new home. Why? Because the working memory Conductor allows you to shift smoothly from thought to thought, to look at the world in a different way, and to think about old information in novel ways.
Stay Motivated to Achieve Long-Term Goals
Let’s say you’re finishing up your secondary education, and you aspire to an Oxbridge college. You may have high marks, but you still have to perform in your A-levels. If you study diligently, you can get the grades you need and stand a good chance of gaining entry to an elite institution. Working memory helps you keep your goal in mind and gives you the motivation you need to put your nose to the grindstone even when your friends are heading out to a party and invite you to join them. Working memory helps you say no.
Stay Positive in the Midst of a Dire Situation
Your Conductor is wired to organize emotions into those that are relevant and those that are not. The Conductor interprets signals from the amygdala, the primitive emotional heart of the brain that generates feelings of fear and anxiety, and then modulates those emotions to help us concentrate on positive thoughts. Later, we’ll show you how this played out when Mario Sepulveda, one of the thirty men rescued from a collapsed Chilean coal mine in 2010, used humor to keep the group from devolving into chaos. Even during the gloomiest days underground, Mario was able to stay upbeat by focusing on the future.
Follow Your Moral Compass
Working memory helps you do the right thing in business, in social interactions, and even in your romantic relationships. It can help you stay faithful while others stray. Research shows that a good working memory gives you romantic self-control. People with a robust working memory manage to keep their relationship goals in mind and act to protect their relationship when something threatens it—like when an attractive coworker comes on to you during a business trip. Conversely, people with poor working memory are more vulnerable to giving in if an opportunity to stray presents itself.
Be a Better Athlete
There are times when a powerful working memory can be your best teammate. Let’s say you’re a tennis player. When the tennis ball comes bouncing to your side of the net, what shot do you make? Forehand cross-court, backhand down the line, lob, drop shot? Working memory helps you sift through the options and choose the best one, all while keeping in mind your opponent’s position on the court. The more quickly your working memory can process all this information, the more likely you are to execute the shot well.
The Most Important Learning Tool: The New IQ
Our society has relied on IQ as the go-to measure of intellectual capability for nearly a century. The common belief is that the higher your IQ, the better your advantage in whatever you do. But a high IQ doesn’t necessarily mean you will get what you want in life. On the other hand, how do some people with below-average IQ scores rise to the top to become business bigwigs, bestselling authors, or innovative inventors? What if we told you that IQ isn’t the best measure of intelligence or the best predictor of lifetime success, especially not in the twenty-first century?
The modern IQ test has its roots in the early twentieth century. In 1917, as World War I raged on, the U.S. Army enlisted Richard Yerkes, the distinguished president of the American Psychological Association, to create a test to measure the intelligence of nearly 3 million army recruits. The army wanted to determine which men should be officers and which should be relegated to the lower ranks. Yerkes designed a test that measured the recruits’ knowledge of facts and vocabulary, also known as crystallized knowledge.
But during wartime when nothing goes according to plan and you have to adapt to enemy tactics or lose, knowing concrete facts—say, that Rutherford B. Hayes was elected president in 1876 or that Bismarck is the capital of North Dakota—isn’t really helpful. Many of the men tagged for high-ranking positions failed miserably, while some men who languished in the lower ranks proved to have excellent military minds. The army quickly realized that Yerkes’s test was identifying the wrong men for the job and abandoned it after six months. But the rest of society has continued to measure intelligence based on the amount of crystallized knowledge you have, and the modern IQ test doesn’t look all that different from Yerkes’s test. That’s a big problem.
Thanks to Google
