In The Ravenous Brain, author Daniel Bor explores the depths of consciousness; how it may be explained within the brain, its great abilities, and its limitations. Bor relates consciousness with attention stating that, "what I attend to is what I'm conscious of" (Bor pp. 112), while what we do not attend to falls to the unconscious mind. Our ability to take this vast amount of information in, attend to it and filter it into the few parts we choose to be conscious of is an amazing feat, one that our brain has an astounding ability for. We use our attention to "filter the billions of pieces of information streaming into our senses... into a maximum of three or four conscious items" (Bor pp. 135). While this may seem limiting, it has shown to be extremely beneficial. Being able to focus on these few items allows us to "boost" our processing of each attended item and to analyze them in a variety of ways. As Bor explains, our initial filtering of information into our attention is often called "working memory." Our working memory, as explained earlier, appears to be quite limited, with only a few objects capable of being in conscious attention at a time. A study by Steven Yantis suggests that working memory may be limited to only 4 conscious items. Also surprising is that this number appears to be the same in monkeys and in newborns (Bor pp.137). So is our working memory really so unimpressive that monkeys and newborns can fill it with just as much as we can? What all of this talk about limitations doesn't explain is just how good we are at attending to those few objects in our consciousness. Bor give the example of the color red. If we see a plain red wall our attention goes to it and our signal of "red" gets boosted. "Non-red color-coding neurons may be suppressed" along with some of our other senses possibly allowing the red wall to grab all of our attention (Bor pp. 139). Okay, so this isn't very impressive, we can look at a red wall and really know that it is red, that's not giving much support to the impressiveness of our working memory. Thankfully, Bor continues this example with the object now being "Angelina Jolie on the big screen... wearing a red dress" (Bor pp. 139). This object has what Bor calls an "internal hook" to it which the brain can "latch onto." Once we see Angelina Jolie and her red dress all information related to her becomes activated: Brad Pitt, her previous roles, how she speaks, and again that she is wearing a red dress. This information seems to instantly come to us and it does simply because we have given our attention to Angelina Jolie in a red dress. Now that is a much more impressive feat for working memory. As Bor continues he explains that some studies have tried to improve our working memory, and some methods are quite efficient at doing so. Chunking, for example, allows a person to "chunk" groups of information together so that they only have to remember those groups rather than the entire set of information. For example remembering 630-847-773 (all Chicago-land area codes) is much easier than remembering each individual number. While discussing this idea Bor briefly mentions the "World Memory Championships." This is a truly incredible event, and Joshua Foer, wrote a great book, Moonwalking With Einstein, about how he trained his working memory in preparation for America's Memory Championship.
Joshua Foer quickly finds out what we already know, that our working memory is extremely capacity limited. Being a good journalist though, he continues working for his story and trains hard to become a "mental athlete" and improve his performance in a variety of mental, mostly memory, tasks. Foer, like so many of us, plateaus in his performance and realizes what Bor explained throughout chapter 4, attention is consciousness, or in Foer's case, attention is better performance. As proof of this Foer and most mental athletes adopt of method of performing with earmuffs, and blinders to focus their attention solely on what's in front of them.
 |
| Joshua Foer during his training. Photograph: Christopher Lane |
Bor, Daniel. The ravenous brain: how the new science of consciousness explains our insatiable search for meaning. New York: Basic Books, 2012. Print.
Foer, Joshua. Moonwalking with Einstein: the art and science of remembering everything. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. Print.
The idea that even with a limited working memory, humans can use the information in a great many ways can be seen as an advantage and a disadvantage. It is true that we are able to use our working memory to a great extent and memorize many things in little time, and possibly retain some of it, but this can be a negative factor. An enhanced working memory is the cause of post traumatic stress disorder, and according to a study done, a short battery on the working and verbal memory causes the likelihood of the disorder to increase 57 times more. This enhancement makes it rather difficult to cure oneself of it, no matter the amount of medication taken.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteRob, I like how you talked about this topic of working memory because it answers some of our questions but also leaves many unanswered. I think it's amazing when I hear stories of when a person uses their working memory and they're able to accomplish an incredible task when they focus and set their mind to it. I believe we can all accomplish memorizing numerous things or work towards becoming a capacity mental athlete. I've come to realize that we use more than 10% of our brains and that that is a myth. Obviously we use all parts of our brains and they all link together. But, I found an article called Wandering Minds Linked With Greater Working Memory, Study Finds about how if people’s minds wander during simple tasks then they may have a higher capacity for a working memory. Now I’ve thought that if you multi-task, you are working your brain more, but I’ve also heard that if you multi-task you are less focused on one thing so you never fully learn one task because you are mixing them. Back to the article, it talks about how when we plan things while we are on the bus, showering, or cycling to work, it is supported by our working memory. People would say this is similar to daydreaming and daydreaming gives your brain a rest. The article talks about how important it is to do this because it also helps your working memory by not hindering its ability to make memories. All in all, we should protect our brains but also use them to our greatest capacity now that we know that we can. I mean why not? We could pick up a project of memorizing numbers or words or anything we set our minds to. I believe that we can learn to use our working memory since we already instantly pick up information and memories from the color red, like you mentioned Angelina Jolie and her dress. It would give us the initiative to use our minds at a new level.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/20/wandering-mind-working-memory-daydreaming_n_1367926.html
I think consciousness and attention are both fascinating subjects. Just the mere idea that we are capable of narrowing our focus in, despite the hundreds of things our brain is processing, is amazing in itself. Furthermore, the variability in attention is always something that's interesting; the fact that some can focus so well when needed, while others might have an impeding factor that might not make them as capable, such as ADD. I also find it interesting how consciousness can have a chain reaction of sorts. Like what Bor talked about, seeing Angelina Jolie in a red dress can trigger many other thoughts about Angelina Jolie. Things like this is what makes memorizing things slightly less intimidating and impossible, which is another reason why the brain is so fascinating. Seeing people use their attention to do things like memorize a deck of cards in 30 seconds just shows how one can really push themselves using the resources they have; additionally, it shows the kind of effect attention can have on working memory, which is significant to say the least. This post was just another reminder of how fascinating the human brain is to me with all it is capable of doing.
ReplyDelete